The Netflix catalog plays tricks on those of us who are dedicated to tracking and talking about series premieres. A project may have no apparent appeal, without well-known faces or a decent trailer, and suddenly you find it on the podium of the most viewed series because the catalog positions the title well. But, while not everything that appears on the list of popular series in the catalog is a real success, the British miniseries Deceptions is. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to even speak of a phenomenon: in its first seven days it has accumulated 238 million hours watched, which translates into 37.1 million views. Since Wednesday landed in November 2022, we have not seen such an astronomical weekly figure. And the series is bad ass.
Maya Stern (Michelle Keegan) buries her husband. He was murdered while they were walking down the street together at night, and as the viewer sees, her mother-in-law (Joanna Lumley) doesn't exactly seem like a woman she can trust for support in caring for her daughter. In these first five minutes, however, two important pieces of information about the protagonist's recent past are also revealed.
Maya's sister was shot in her own home, a priori with no connection to the murder of her husband, and the protagonist carries secrets or traumas "from what happened in the army." The viewer only needs a friend to give Maya a secret camera to spy on the nanny, a lifelong friend of her in-laws, to begin the mystery: in the recordings, after arriving home, she sees her deceased husband.
Deceptions is an adaptation of a novel by Harlan Coben, the American author who has punished us since the nineties with books adaptable to television. This implies that the clues to solve the case are presented in such an obvious way that the only thing missing is a sign on the screen that warns the viewer to take notes: the dialogues have the subtlety of a Shakira lyric.
Piece by piece, the viewer has a guarantee: the mystery will be an accumulation of past traumas, hidden secrets and coincidences that, despite being resolved (artificially), will not offer a complete story to the viewer. Because to tell a story you need characters and what is on the screen are instruments to surprise the viewer with cheap tricks. And, when a series needs one stupid decision after another to propel itself forward, you're dealing with a bad script.
How can you have a background in law enforcement, see the most shocking images of your career, and confront the babysitter without saving a copy of the file? In what context does it make sense to be a functional and respectable mother and have automatic weapons displayed at home as if they were works of art? And how can it be that each revelation buries the protagonist's erratic behavior even further?
In the midst of this unmitigated horror, the actors offer embarrassing performances, which seem like dramatic scenes from a typical porn movie, those that the restless viewer skips to get to the good stuff. But perhaps the actors were intelligent and understood that, faced with such a catastrophic work, it was not worth investing even a bit of their talent, as if the cameras on the set were cursed and could be stolen from them. It's that bad.
