At the outset, it seems that the new miniseries Love & Death (HBO Max, April 27) is doing something that last year’s Hulu series Candy did not. Both cover the killing of Betty Gore at the hands of Candy Montgomery, a suburban Dallas housewife who was acquitted at trial after pleading self-defense. Instead of Candy’s lurid broad strokes, the early episodes of Love & Death take their time, patiently and thoughtfully fleshing out the world that an axe will, in a couple years’ time, tear asunder.
Candy is played by Elizabeth Olsenblessedly freed (for the time being) from the demands of Marvel and thus able to stretch her actorly muscles. She is, in the beginning of Love & Deatha magnetic force, rendering Candy as a kind and collected woman slowly undone by restlessness. Candy embarks on an affair with Allan Gore (Jesse Plemmons), Betty’s shuffling, awkward husband. He’s not exactly the hunky pool boy, but he’s enough to make Candy feel like she’s grabbing a bit more of life. Meanwhile, Betty (Lily Rabe) is spiraling, unmoored by postpartum depression and clinging ever more tightly (and suspiciously) to her husband.
Written by David E. Kelley and directed by television mainstay Lesli Linka Glatter, Love & Death is at its best when it’s using the framing of a sensational true-crime case to explore more general human experience: malaise, transgression, the stifle of social order. It’s also frank and sweetly funny about sex, which was as much a part of life for devout Christian suburbanites in late 1970s Texas as it was, perhaps, for lots of folks on the go-go coasts. Olsen may be amping up some of Candy’s mannerisms for dramatic effect, but for the most part the early episodes of the show are empathetically human.
After Betty’s death, though, the series loses its way. What had once been a finely tuned character study becomes wooden and formulaic. Kelley’s, and Olsen’s, picture of Candy stops developing—it even regresses. Manically singing in her car and staring blankly at her trial, Candy becomes almost a cartoon of domestic repression and potential malevolence. While the show stays mostly on Candy’s side—Betty Gore’s death was a complicated matter, and there is no evidence of any kind that it was premeditated—it also uses her to crude ends.
Love & Death ultimately has no argument, no salient reason to exist beyond the titillation it wisely avoids in its first few episodes. If there was no conclusion to be drawn from this sorry story, maybe a show didn’t need to be made—twice. Especially when, just last year, Antonio Campos made such a probing, thematically rewarding venture into true-crime with The Staircasealso on Max. That series turned the genre’s gaze back onto itself, and in so doing perhaps made the case for its end. In some ways, Love & Death proves Campos’s point: that true-crime has a dehumanizing effect even as it pretends at compassion.
Love & Death isn’t a cruel show, but with its ironic needle-drops and fussy style, it sometimes plays like a joke. Which is a shame, because Olsen offers up the rough clay of a fair and measured performance, only for it to go unshaped by Kelley and Glatter. Or maybe it’s molded in the wrong way, into a simple and all too familiar form. There could be more to the Candy Montgomery story than the discordance of an upstanding churchgoer finding herself in this bloody situation, but by the end, that’s all the show seems interested in teasing out. There’s Candy, in her proper clothing and sensible station wagon, at the center of a horror. And isn’t that weird?
Still, there are performances to savor: Olsen for a stretch, Rabe’s brittle and unhappy inverse to Candy’s sunny ease, Patrick runs away’s wimpy decency as Candy’s husband, Tom Pelphrey’s slick oration as Candy’s defense attorney. They all provide worthy texture for a series direly in need of it. Maybe they can get together in a few years and try it again. The third time could be the charm.
