I was originally going to do a "Rank 'Em" post for "Roar," the Apple TV+ anthology, as I have with other recent anthologies like "Black Mirror" and "Love Death and Robots." This is an eight episode series based on Cecelia Ahern's short story collection of the same name, with showrunners Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch, who created "GLOW." Some of the episodes are based directly on Ahern's stories, and others just follow the same format of magical realist fables about women's experiences. However, this is one of those cases where I think the show as a whole is more interesting than its individual episodes.
"Roar" has its ups and downs, as all anthologies do, but I stuck with this one because it was very easy viewing. Each episode is roughly thirty minutes long, and features a little genre gimmick - sometimes a very literal depiction of a common metaphor. "The Woman Who Found Bite Marks on Her Skin" is being visibly eaten alive by her guilt. "The Woman Who Was Kept on a Shelf" follows the career of a trophy wife who is obliged to spend her whole marriage on an actual shelf. Some are more fanciful, and some are more grounded. Two stories break from form entirely - a murder mystery where a ghostly Allison Brie plays "The Woman Who Solved Her Own Murder," and a girl power western with Fivel Stewart, "The Girl Who Loved Horses." The show often feels like a female-centric "Twilight Zone," with a lighter mood and more absurdist bent.
What sets the better episodes apart is the execution. The talent involved here is top tier, featuring all women creatives. Episodes feature Nicole Kidman, Judy Davis, Issa Rae, Merritt Weaver, Meera Syal, and Betty Gilpin. Rahida Jones and Channing Godfrey Peoples are among the directors. However, it feels like a crapshoot as to which combination of talent yields good results. The Issa Rae episode is about trying to navigate a creative career as a black woman, which results in our heroine literally becoming invisible - a thuddingly obvious analogy that isn't handled well. The Nicole Kidman episode has the promising idea of her character eating photographs to relive her memories, but this stays disconnected from the actual story, which is about her changing relationship with her ailing mother. Both episodes look great, but are oddly written with weak endings, little humor, and don't seem quite committed to being genre stories.
The best episode is probably "The Woman Who Was Fed By a Duck," which stars Merritt Weaver as a woman who gets romantically involved with a talking duck, voiced by Justin Kirk. I also liked "The Woman Who Found Bite Marks on Her Skin" with Cynthia Erivo, and "The Woman Who Returned Her Husband," where Meera Syal's character decides to split from her husband after decades of marriage. Fortunately, she still has her receipt for him. These episodes all stand out because they got me to empathize with the main characters and their underlying struggles. They're also successful at telling satisfying genre stories and connecting them to the characters' ongoing dilemmas. Erivo dealing with mysterious bite marks might be a very simple and predictable idea, but as part of a depiction of post-partum depression and the usual body horror of motherhood, it works.
While I love the recent embrace of fantasy and science fiction shows over the past few years, it has not escaped my notice that it's still fairly rare to find programs that explicitly explore women's stories through these lenses. "Roar" delivers the kind of genre programming that I want to see more of in the current media landscape - more diverse, more thoughtful, and more human scale. The social commentary is obvious, but rarely feels the need to draw attention to itself. The target audience is clearly a little older than we normally see, but the level of talent that this project attracted makes it clear that the creative impulse to make this kind of content is alive and well.
Cecilia Ahern's "Roar" collection has plenty of other stories to adapt, and I hope we'll get a chance to see more of them somewhere down the line.
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