Parents' Guide to Malice

Beautifully shot and full of twists, this series reaches for gripping and intense drama, but its underwritten characters render the emotional impact toothless. Duchovny's Jamie has the most fully realized role, and Duchovny makes the most of it, swaggering around with a barely-on shirt, tossing insults to his wife, kids, and guests alike. He's a bad guy, see? the drama seems to suggest; he deserves the comeuppance this series gives him, and every character has at least some motivation for doing him harm. But Malice's very first scene lets us know what happened to Jamie, and telegraphs who done it, which removes a great deal of this drama's suspense.

Robbed of the surprise that might lend this murder mystery some oomph, Malice is left trying to wring tension from the interplay of its characters, but they're too thinly drawn to really grab the audience's sympathy. Jamie's an unrepentant jerk, his wife's discontented, the kids are mostly ignored by their cocktail-swilling parents; Jules and Damien are bored, rich, and envious of the Tanners. Adam himself is a Tom Ripley-esque character who ingratiates into these people's lives and ferrets out the insecurities and hidden pain beneath the casual cocktail-party chat. But while Ripley was a character who horrified the audience by being so sympathetic yet doing such terrible things, Adam is a cipher, more of a plot device than a realistic villain. "Rich people behaving badly" is a reliable television premise, but Malice is a tepid realization; your time's better spent rewatching The White Lotus or Big Little Lies.