Apple TV+
Amateur female detectives are having a streaming TV moment, thanks first to Natasha Lyonne and Rian Johnson’s Poker Face and now courtesy of Patricia Arquette’s High Desert, the loopy story of a woman who seeks redemption—and locates a world of criminal trouble—via a sleuthing career. Buoyed by a wacko, drugged-out, sunburnt, New Age-y energy that faintly recalls The Big Lebowski, Nancy Fichman, Katie Ford and Jennifer Hoppe-House’s Apple TV+ series (premiering May 17) is ramshackle in the right ways, led by Arquette’s tour-de-force of mad, messy, brazen desperation and determination.
Directed by Jay Roach (Austin Powers, Meet the Parents) and executive-produced by Ben Stiller (who’s previously teamed with Arquette on Escape at Dannemora and Severance), High Desert is a comedy whose title is meant to be taken literally. In Yucca Valley, California, felon Peggy (Arquette) is still picking up the pieces of a ten-years-prior calamity in which her family was torn apart—with her husband Denny (Matt Dillon) going to jail—by a DEA drug bust that ruined their narcotics-funded good life. Denny remains in prison and Peggy scrapes by working at local Pioneer Town for Owen (Kevin Can F**k Himself’s Eric Petersen), all while mourning the recent loss of her beloved mother Rosalyn (Bernadette Peters) and her continuing estrangement from her son Ethan.
Moreover, she’s at odds with her siblings Dianne (Christine Taylor) and Stewart (Keir O’Donnell), who view her as an unrepentant screw-up and want her to move out of their mom’s house so they can sell it.