Following hot on the heels of “The White Lotus“, Netflix’s “Sirens” falls into the flourishing genre of satirical “wealth TV”, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph.
The five-part series is “a blackly comic affair” that stars Julianne Moore as Michaela Kell, a “preposterously rich” socialite whose passion project is conserving birds of prey. Her life is managed by her young PA Simone (Milly Alcock), who works around the clock to maintain the perfection of her boss’s impossibly luxurious clifftop mansion, while catering adoringly to her every whim. We see all this through the eyes of an outsider, Simone’s grungy, alcoholic sister Devon (Meghann Fahy), who turns up at the property to insist that Simone come home and help her care for their father, who has dementia.
Simone is horrified by the unexpected arrival at Michaela’s compound of her chaotic sister, said Dan Einav in the Financial Times. Devon, for her part, is unimpressed by the Stepford Wives nature of the set-up there, and begins to suspect that Michaela is the leader of a cult from whose clutches she must rescue Simone.
Each episode of the drama, which also stars Kevin Bacon as Kell’s financier husband, unfurls “in a burst of chaotic energy”, said Katie Rosseinsky in The Independent. The “breakneck speed” of the plotting leads to some absurdities, and the show’s attempts to marry scathing class satire with a “more serious” exploration of family dynamics often makes it tonally jarring. Still, as an “unpredictable slice of slightly bonkers summer escapism”, “Sirens” is “irresistibly alluring”.
This ‘blackly comic affair’ unfurls at a ‘breakneck speed’
