True crime’s appeal often hinges on the frisson of danger that white suburban women get from watching someone just like them commit a terrible crime or succumb to a murderer’s wrath. It’s a knotty convergence of race, gender, and class that few true crime series interrogate. Candy, a five-part miniseries that debuted Monday on Hulu, only seems interested in gender, as it examines the domestic malaise that drives its title character to a shocking act of violence. Unfortunately, it abandons its more interesting questions for a lurid courtroom finale that, despite some interesting narrative choices, can’t transcend its genre trappings. Stellar performances buoy the series, however, making Candy a true crime showcase worth watching.
It is Friday 13, 1980 in Wylie, Texas: “The day she died.” “She” is Betty Gore (Melanie Lynskey), a churchgoing housewife struggling with postpartum depression. Betty isn’t very popular, at church or at home — the women of Wylie view Betty as a morally superior scold who enjoys looking down her nose at others, and her husband Allan (Pablo Schreiber) does his best to spend as much time outside the house as possible. Betty’s best friend Candy Montgomery (Jessica Biel) is her polar opposite. Where Betty is prim and dour, Candy is a bubbly super-mom, seen as the perfect wife and mother by all her friends. Things aren’t great at home for Candy either, though; her husband Pat (Timothy Simons) is oblivious to her sexual desires, and Candy soon reaches out to Allan to fulfill her needs.
Dreamy music underscores the suburban ennui that Betty and Candy face. The production design, wardrobe, and hair (Biel’s wig deserves a credit of its own) place the story firmly in 1980. The color scheme of Betty’s house — the scene of the crime — seeps into the cinematography. Harvest golds and blood reds create a sickly patina that reflects both women’s malaise and the violence that awaits them. Emphasis on mundane household items — lingering shots of a ringing phone, a pincushion, or a macramé owl adorning Betty’s front door — finds menace in the mundane, highlighting the true crime ambrosia of danger hiding below the surface of (white suburban) daily life.
It’s not hard to figure out where things go once Candy and Allan’s affair begins, though the particulars of the case are still shocking: Candy strikes Betty with an axe 41 times, leaving her in a pool of her own blood and leaving her baby crying alone for hours. It’s perfect true crime fodder: a gory crime scene, the pathos of an infant crying for her dead mother; jealousy, rage, sex. It’s so perfect, in fact, that Candy’s story is set to be adapted multiple times. Love and Death, featuring its own impressive cast, premieres on HBO Max later this year. Though the tone of this second miniseries is yet to be seen, it is interesting to note the difference in titles: Candy centers the murderer, examining Candy’s motives as a woman trapped in an unfulfilling marriage and making her as sympathetic as possible.
That sympathy is due primarily to Jessica Biel’s career-best performance. Candy navigates the pressures of her small town as best she can: she dutifully, even cheerfully, plays the role of the perfect wife, mother, and neighbor. But her desires bubble just below her cheery exterior, and Biel imbues Candy with so much yearning to break free of her stultifying domestic life that you can’t help but sympathize with this poor woman who just wants to get laid. Once Candy has decided to “take a lover,” as she puts it, the camera adopts her POV for a while, resulting in the horniest cinematic volleyball game this side of Top Gun. The series jumps over too many emotional beats, though. Candy and Allan initially agree to end their affair if either one of them develops feelings for the other, but when Candy confesses that she is doing just that, Allan begs her not to stop. He needs the break from his wife too badly. There’s a major problem, though: we don’t actually see evidence of Candy’s feelings, nor do we see how she descends from “I have feelings for you” to “I will strike your wife 41 times with an axe.” Candy’s motive doesn’t get any room to breathe, which turns the series into just another true-crime recitation of the facts of the case. While viewers can certainly fill in the dots, we shouldn’t have to do that much emotional legwork with a script that at this point in the story turns into a Wikipedia page. Biel does the best she can, but there’s nothing there for her to work with in terms of Candy’s character arc.
The rest of the cast bring their A game right along with Biel. Melanie Lynskey is perfectly cast, if underused. Lynskey is a master at presenting a placid surface that belies the intense, chaotic, and dangerous emotions roiling underneath. The script doesn’t give her a lot to do beyond frown at the mountain of frustrations that make up Betty’s life, but she is stellar as always at conveying a ticking time bomb that never has a chance to go off. Raúl Esparza brings his trademark swagger, giving Candy’s attorney Don Crowder a jovial arrogance that plays well with Biel’s frizzy desperation. The most compelling performance, however, comes from Pablo Schreiber. He can’t turn off his natural charisma, transforming the milquetoast Allan into Candy’s most transfixing character. Schreiber is incredibly understated, but he has a gravity that pulls the viewer’s attention to him in every scene he’s in. That gravity does some of the work that the script refuses to do in terms of explaining Candy’s motive, giving the affair more narrative heft than it has on the page.
Early episodes seem focused on the effects of small-town pressure to be the perfect wife and mother while dealing with a suffocating life of domesticity: husbands who take them for granted, demanding children, gossiping neighbors, unfulfilled lives of tedium and casseroles. But by the finale, Candy seems to lose interest in the idea of these women suffocating under the weight of their domestic lives, choosing instead to focus on the spectacle of Candy’s trial. The final episode feels as long as the preceding four put together, with an extended Psycho-esque psychological explanation for the murder fully taking the wind out of the series’ sails. (Though it is always a pleasure to see Esparza grandstand.) Had even a hint of that idea been developed in earlier episodes, it likely would have landed a lot better, but as it stands it grinds the narrative to a halt. Candy gets confused at this point, choosing a fairly by-the-numbers finale that seems enamored with the sordid twists and juicy ironies it had seemed to avoid in earlier episodes, mostly giving up on its exploration of women trapped in marriages that have become a routine rather than an expression of love.
Fans of true crime will likely enjoy Candy — the undeniably fascinating story coupled with a clever, if occasionally convoluted, narrative structure makes for compelling binge-watching. Based on the performances alone, it’s an easy series to recommend. However, while Candy tries at first to examine the phenomenon of women’s love for true crime by exploring the gender-based unhappiness of marriage and motherhood, it loses sight of these character-driven questions, leaving its stellar cast stranded with nothing else to do.
