(courtesy AppleTV+ via IMDb)
Streaming platforms of late have developed a rather severe case of BroadcastTV-itis, a terrible disease that compels those who commission programs to cancel them after one season, or sometimes not even that, if they don’t attract 100 million eyeballs in the first ten minutes or so.
People like this reviewer had become used to streamers giving a program a few seasons at least (Netflix seems enamoured of four as the magic marker of longevity it varies platform to platform) but now suddenly you can dive into a show, get to the binge-fuelled end – not so easy these days with most releasing an episode a week but it’s easy to save them up if you want – and find out that’s all you’re ever going to get.
Case in recent point is High Desert, a deliciously quirky show about broken, dysfunctional people doing their best to make life work for them and not have it used them as puppets on poorly-made and maintained strings, which offered up eight entertaining episodes centred largely on Peggy (Patricia Arquette), a resident of arid Yucca Valley, California, and an eldest child and addict who is grappling with how to be happy when trauma has never really let her out of its grip.
Constantly scrabbling for the next golden ticket that will elevate her life above the mundane and the unfulfilled, Peggy is adrift, unsure what to do next after the recent death of her raspy-voiced, larger-than-life and messy mum Roslyn (Bernadette Peters) with whom she had a complicated relationship.
Essentially acting as a mum to her siblings after their father abandoned them to live with his mistress years earlier, Peggy has taken the weight off the world on her and crumbled under the pressure, unable to process the grief and trauma of multiple hits to any sense of cosy domesticity, with her only recourse being a life of rampant drug use, crime and marriage to fellow lacklustre human Denny (Matt Dillon).
Her life is like one big Ponzi scheme, full of bold, empty promises, earnest pleading, grandiose gestures with no hope of any lasting value and a robbing of existential Peter to pay Paul, promising one thing to one person if it gets her out of a scrape with another.
She is, by any measure, a mess but in the hands of the superlatively funny and thoughtfully nuanced hands of creators/writers Nancy Fichman, Katie Ford and Jennifer Hoppe-House, she is also a brazenly brave delight, an emotionally accessible character who makes you wince but whose tenacity is a thing of almost inspiring epicness and beauty.
Peggy wants life to work so badly that she makes things up on the spot, deciding that she will become a private investigator (P.I.) almost on a whim and telling beleaguered P.I. Bruce Harvey (Brad Garrett) that she is working for him now.
He lets it happen because like so many people in Peggy’s life from bestie Carol (Weruche Opia) to Owen (Eric Petersen) boss at the tired, sad Wild Western town where she works (barely) and even weird pseudo-guru Bob (Rupert Friend), he has little choice with Peggy overwhelming anyone who stands in her wake through a mix of chutzpah, smart, snappy unending dialogue and an unwillingness to give up the fight even when the odds are against her, as they so often are.
What makes her such a compelling character, and thus makes the lack of a second season in which to see her strut her perilously brave stuff once again such a travesty, is that much of the sanguine bravery that propels her chaotically forward is barely masked desperation and depression, her vulnerability allowed to come to the surface at times when no one is looking and she can let the mask slip enough to mourn her mum, what could have been of her life and, pretty much every time, pop some sort of pill or tab to get her through the pain.
She is a highly likeable, warm and honest human being in many ways because even though much of her bravura is fake it till you make it stuff, the raw, broken and hungry humanity behind it is as authentic and honest as it comes.
Not many people realise that and even those that do like Carol and Denny and even possible murderer-art thief Guru Bob are too wrapped up in their own self-serving delusions to really care too much whether what they’re seeing is the real deal or trauma-informed wish-making of the most intense and grittiest kind.
High Desert is a hugely affecting and entertaining story of quirky, fallible people trying to lasso a little of the American Dream for themselves all while discovering and doing their best to ignore the fact that the system is stacked against them and that they themselves might be their own worst enemies.
Peppered with smart, beautifully delivered dialogue and outrageously over-the-top characters who manage to also feel winningly grounded, High Desert is one of those eccentric shows that uses its larger-than-life sensibilities to tell some very human stories with gravitas and generous lashings of black humour and a frothy sense of the comedically ridiculous too.
It’s that rare mix of the sublime silly and the serious that holds the tension between the two perfectly so that even as you’re laughing, and sometimes even cringing at the latest ploy by Peggy to best the world and the people around her if it gives her even a small leg up to the success she desperately has to believe should be hers, you’re also intensely feeling just how badly these people want life to work for them.
In some ways it’s a scathing put down of the American Dream that promises the world but deliver precious little to many of those who ardently pursue it, but it wraps this withering social commentary up in a show that knows humour and vibrantly fulsome characterisation will make the point far more effectively than polemic ranting from a streaming pedestal.
High Desert is one of those shows that could have really done some very cool things with its sense of place and its people, and while it ends with some sort of resolution, insofar as Peggy has bested and been bested by the world once again despite her best fast-talking efforts, it would have been good to see what else lay in wait for a woman whose humanity may seem flawed but who is, at the end of the day, likely the most real distillation of humanity we’ve seen in a while.