Jessica Biel Can’t Help Hulu’s Confused Candy Coalesce: Review

The Pitch: The story of Candy Montgomery is almost too gruesome and eerily-timed to feel true: On Friday, the 13th, one June in 1980, a pleasant, well-liked suburban housewife in a bucolic northeastern Texas town went over to her friend and neighbor Betty Gore’s house, and murdered her with an axe.

She slashed her 41 times, 40 of them while her heart was still beating. Then, she took a shower in Betty’s home to clean off the blood, and drove back home to continue her day like nothing had happened… with Betty’s newborn infant crying in her dead mother’s home for thirteen hours before the body was found.

Even crazier than that? Candy would end up being found not guilty.

Naturally, it’s the kind of lurid true-crime story that would spawn not one, but two miniseries in our murder-happy pop culture landscape: another is set to premiere later this year on HBO Max with Elizabeth Olsen.

But Hulu’s Candy, which stars Jessica Biel in the title role (replacing Elisabeth Moss, who dropped out), reached the finish line first, a five-night limited series event that seeks to emulate the old-fashioned TV miniseries model of airing a new episode each weekday of its release before culminating on, you guessed it, Friday the 13th.

And really, that throwback model may be Candy‘s most novel approach, which is bad news for the show’s sense of novelty. Unfortunately, while creators Nick Antosca (The Act) and Robin Veith (Mad Men, The Expanse) and their creative team have a (literally) killer cast and oodles of atmosphere to work with, there may not be much nutrition behind the sickly-sweet melodrama of Candy‘s ripped-from-the-headlines events.

Candy (Hulu)

Her husband, Pat (Veep‘s Timothy Simons) is a gormless, well-meaning dork who’s as nice as he is deeply boring, and a stray story from a fellow church member who recounts her post-separation dalliances lights a fire under her to start an affair of her own. To her credit, Biel does a lot with such a mercurial character, never indicating too closely the extent of Candy’s premeditation that fateful June morning.

Same goes for Melanie Lynskey, who channels a lot of that pent-up rage she’s used so well in Yellowjackets earlier this year; frowning under a bowl-cut wig and swimming hopelessly in mumus, Betty’s pre-murder flashbacks parallel Candy’s own misery nicely. Where Candy finds purpose and life in her delusions, Lynskey’s Betty is beaten down by age, the stresses of work and motherhood, and the relative disinterest of dull mope Allan (Pablo Schreiber, bringing back the ol’ pornstache once more).

Both together and apart, both actresses make a meal out of the humdrum tedium of their characters’ lives, bolstered by Michael Uppendahl’s downright Soderberghian direction — all distanced shots, dimly-lit tacky homes drenched in depressing browns and beiges.

The show is its most cohesive, though, when it explores the nuclear-family hell of heteronormativity that drives Betty to misery and Candy to murder: They’re Betty Drapers without the glamour, women of substance and intelligence hopelessly stuck in meandering lives their church and community told them to have.

Plus, their husbands are either too boring and complacent (Pat) or too useless to give them purpose; witness a newly-widowed Allan squirting dish soap into the dishwasher, or admitting he doesn’t know how to change a diaper, but surmising that, as “an engineer,” he should be able to muddle through. Candy‘s most interesting (if hardly insightful) when it uses the true-crime milieu to condemn the societal circumstances that led to these two women’s eventual fates.

Candy (Hulu)