TV Review: Chloe Season 1

Chloe Season 1

Creator: Alice Seabright

Starring: Erin Doherty, Billy Howle, Pippa Bennett-Warner, Jack Farthing, Brandon Micheal Hall, Lisa Palfrey, Poppy Gilbert, Alexander Eliot, Akshay Khanna, Eloise Thomas, Gia Hunter

Runtime: 6 episodes

Some Spoilers Follow:

As more and more people become critical of social media so do other forms of media.  Films and series depicting the dangers of obsessively following the curated images and posts of others’ lives have become common in the last few years, with examples including Ingrid Goes West, Unfriended, and episodes of Black Mirror, among many others.  Amazon Prime’s new series Chloe is one of the latest such projects but while it’s certainly intriguing it’s ultimately unable to distinguish itself strongly enough from its peers in either this new genre or the others it dabbles in, such as neo-noir.

Released by the BBC in February and available on Prime worldwide now, Chloe follows Becky Green (Erin Doherty), an isolated young British woman who tries to escape her dull life by obsessing over the glamorous existences of others, especially Chloe Fairbourne (Poppy Gilbert), a childhood friend from whom Becky has grown estranged, through social media.  Becky’s desire to be someone other than herself has already begun to lead to bad choices as she’s quick to use the credentials of work associates, and sometimes even steal their clothes, to get into the glitzy events and privileged in-crowd she desperately wants to be a part of.  But she steps onto an even more dangerous path when she learns that Chloe committed suicide.  After finding that Chloe called her the night she died Becky becomes determined to find out what caused the tragedy.  She constructs a new identity, Sasha Miles, that she uses to befriend many of Chloe’s loved ones, especially her girlfriend Livia Fulton (Pippa Bennett-Warner) and widower Elliot (Billy Howle).  In the course of her investigation, Becky becomes enthralled by her new life as Sasha, leading her to question her own identity, past, and future.

The best thing Chloe has going for it is the character of Becky.  This is largely thanks to Doherty, who turns in a spectacular performance that is equally emotional and darkly fun to watch.  Doherty captures the many different sides of the character, smoothly alternating between being quietly awkward, charming, coldly ruthless, and sympathetic.  The writers also deserve credit for how well fleshed-out the character is and for balancing the reasons for and consequences of her actions.  The series is not as focused on the actual mechanics of social media as some of its peers.  The various apps seen are mostly used as tools for Becky to facilitate her infiltration and investigation.  But the theme of obsession and its effects on the mind is ever-present.  Becky’s pursuit of her fixations causes her to behave selfishly, inappropriately, and sometimes even dangerous but as the depths of her loneliness and her painful backstory come to light it’s hard not to feel for and even support her.  Still, her story isn’t without its flaws.  It leads to an interesting, even moving, conclusion, but for most of the series, Becky’s contentious relationship with her prickly, dementia-suffering mother (Lisa Palfrey) come across simply as a standard prestige TV inclusion.  The plotting also raises an inconsistency with the basic design of the character.  Becky is able to ingratiate herself to most of Chloe’s friends so quickly and seemingly easily that one wonders why she is so lonely in the first place, as she should be able to build a real life for herself just as she made a fake one for Sasha.  This could have been an interesting irony, with Becky finding confidence in her lies that she previously hadn’t had but the idea is not explored thoroughly enough.

The rest of the show is similarly uneven.  The supporting cast is uniformly strong, with Howle as a standout, and their characters, especially Elliot, are given some interesting development early on.  The series is also largely successful at exploring the devastating emotional aftermath of suicide but the mystery elements also create a romanticized intrigue to the whole thing that results in it occasionally coming across as exploitative.  The ending is bold enough not to spell everything out directly but it does push the viewer towards a particular conclusion, and it’s one of the most predictable, least interesting choices it could have made.  Stylistically the show is well shot and benefits from choices such as minimal use of score that create an atmosphere that is both natural and foreboding.  But editing choices such as the use of often silent flashbacks every few minutes are more routine for this kind of thriller.

Chloe is well worth watching, and arguably would be even for Doherty’s performance alone.  And for viewers who don’t watch a lot of similar shows and or movies, it may be a very engrossing experience.  But those who are well-versed in the mystery genre and or social media-fueled narratives may find it too similar to other stories.