Bernadette Peters and Patricia Arquette make sense as mother and daughter the moment you think of their voices. Both sometimes access a posh, low, slightly unnatural register for emphasis, and both speak with a pleasing but idiosyncratic cadence, clipping some syllables and drawing others out. One is brunette and the other blond, but they’re both vivacious, clever, tricky to place in time and more than a little bit weird.
Alas, Peters’s character, Roslyn, has died when the madcap first season of “High Desert,” Nancy Fichman, Katie Ford and Jennifer Hoppe-House’s new Apple TV Plus dramedy, kicks off. Arquette plays her daughter, defender and best friend, Peggy Newman. And in Peggy, who comes to our screens Wednesday, TV has a new odd and utterly captivating protagonist.
With “Mommy” dead, Peggy’s spiraling. She’s been slowly lowering her methadone dosage to get sober, and she’s shocked when her siblings, Dianne (Christine Taylor) and Stewart (Keir O’Donnell) — who had been paying the mortgage — inform her that they’re selling the home she shared with their mother.
A former drug dealer, addict and hustler, Peggy — whose husband, Denny (Matt Dillon), is in prison — had been taking care of Roslyn while also working part time (with gusto, mind you, giving it her all) as a cancan dancer and stage fighter at a ramshackle amusement park called Pioneer Town.
Peggy’s not exactly a model employee. She routinely flouts her downtrodden boss Owen’s (Eric Petersen) rule about cellphones on the job and pillages his Keurig, and her stage maneuvers run the gamut from impressive to imprecise. But here’s one thing that sets “High Desert” apart: Rather than occupy the usual range of TV workplace affects (embittered, bored, ironic), Peggy is perennially engaged. She’s a felon, sure, but she finds people interesting, and she’s a good sport. She takes careful note of what her co-workers do and say. She understands her boss’s own set of mommy issues. Although not a particularly persuasive 1870s prostitute, she works about as hard at Pioneer Town as she does anywhere else. Her co-workers love her.
When Owen finds money missing from his safe and accuses Peggy of stealing from him, her attentiveness pays off. She notices that her colleague Tammy (Susan Park) showed up to work with breast implants — despite having just been dumped by her rich fiance, a former news anchor who now calls himself “Guru Bob” (Rupert Friend) — and concludes that Tammy is responsible for the theft.
It is Peggy’s feeling that Guru Bob, not Tammy, whose cheap $3,000 boob job is punishing her enough, should pay Owen back.
Peggy doesn’t stop at solving mysteries, you see. She sets out to get vigilante justice. So she starts hunting down Guru Bob, and when it seems another co-worker is being bilked by a detective slow-walking the job she hired him to do, Peggy goes after him, too. One “case” leads to another: Peggy figures out, via a video Tammy sends her from Bob’s home, that he has a stolen Picasso. In the course of pestering him to pay Tammy’s debt, she figures out it’s a forgery. She’ll eventually figure out his wife is missing — and why.
To the extent that “High Desert” has a premise, this is it: Peggy’s acumen, combined with her criminal experience, makes her a natural detective. She eventually negotiates with the hangdog detective Bruce (Brad Garrett) that she’ll work with him, free, while she trains to become one.
It sounds like a tidy premise for a tidy show. “High Desert” has for good reason been compared to “Poker Face,” another show featuring a witty, irreverent, charming lowlife who moonlights as a sleuth. Both are extremely funny. Both feature terrific actresses with great sunglasses and shag haircuts.
But the parallels end there. “Poker Face’s” Charlie (Natasha Lyonne) is, in practice, almost implausibly functional, kind and effective. Peggy isn’t. She’s a shrewd negotiator, but her schemes backfire as often as they work. Her siblings understandably resent her lack of follow-through; she can’t bring herself to sit through even one hour of detective training. Her best friend, Carol (Weruche Opia), who’s sort of on the lam and living under an assumed name, goes in her stead.
It’s fascinating to watch Peggy’s flaws stack up. She lies. She steals. She exaggerates. She’s an effective negotiator because she’s a huckster: She can size up people’s vulnerabilities. She drives on LSD. She more or less hijacks a bus, sure she saw her mother on it, then hijacks that Roslyn look-alike’s life. After reassuring her sister Dianne that the “family home” is hers, too (and wheedling money to buy a new car because she totaled hers), she changes the locks to keep her siblings out.
She swipes other people’s DoorDash orders. Confiscates a man’s opioids and sells some while taking the others herself. Revels in the discovery of a dead woman’s severed finger, because it means she might collect a reward.
She has also, for reasons the first season doesn’t make entirely clear, lost custody of her son.
That none of this seriously imperils the viewer’s willingness to follow Peggy is — in a culture that still tends to enjoy male scoundrels and discipline female ones — a testament to Arquette’s finely calibrated performance. She plays Peggy as variously excessive and resourceful and charming, noble, fragile, perceptive, ruinously dishonest, generous and sincere, sentimental, morally ambitious, kind and destructive. But she is, above all else, believable. There’s a reason for that. The character was based on Fichman’s sister. “She did have this idea one day that she wanted to be a PI. Although knowing she wouldn’t do it, I thought she’d be very well suited for that because drug addicts have a tremendous radar,” Fichman said in a piece by the Desert Sun’s Ema Sasic. “They can get to the heart of a problem in a person.” This is one of the more complete, warts-and-all depictions of an addict in a “sober-ish” phase. Peggy’s full of surprises. And initiatives. She knows art. (Really knows it.) Loves Wagner. Writes a play.
Peggy isn’t the only kook. “High Desert” is, to my delight, set in Yucca Valley. (As a Californian, I am fond of the state’s harsher landscapes and weird subcultures.) The show, directed by Jay Roach (“Meet the Parents,” “Austin Powers”), practically frolics in the dusty alien majesty of the California desert and in the eccentricities of those who elect to reside there. Dillon is pleasantly scummy as Denny, the manipulative, ne’er-do-well husband whom Peggy clearly needs to divorce but who truly does “get” her. Friend is a weaselly ball of nerves as the aforementioned Guru Bob, who destroyed his career in journalism with the epiphany “Everything is stupid!” and now runs a cult and sells forged paintings. I have not mentioned his missing wife, the forger of Picassos and Cézannes (Tonya Glanz), her Mafia-connected brothers, the crook who bought one of her works and resents being duped (Carlo Rota) or his daughter and enforcer (Julia Rickert), who enjoys slicing off other people’s body parts.
Though it doesn’t quite make sense to compare this series to one like “Better Call Saul,” Peggy belongs to the Jimmy McGill school of amiable crooks seeking redemption — she’s that well-rendered, that compelling — and there’s no shortage of colorful petty criminals to choose from in this universe. But “High Desert” is more frenetic and shaggier around the edges than its Albuquerque counterpart. Less a methodical story of transformation than a joyful experiment in proliferating storylines and schemes.
What saves “High Desert” from being satire or black comedy is an earnestness at its heart. It could and probably should have pruned a few plot twists to get back to its core themes: Bereavement. Family. Purpose. Mom. We get a little of Peggy’s relationship with her mother in acid flashbacks, but — especially considering what Peters can do — not nearly enough.
What keeps “High Desert” from greatness (though there is hope, if it gets another season!) is a failure to unite the farcical stuff, much of which is delightful, with the deeper story. The plot starts to feel so crowded, rushed and messy that the finale (critics got all eight episodes) at times feels as if it was written by — rather than for — Peggy.
High Desert (eight episodes) premieres May 17 on Apple TV Plus. The first three episodes will drop at once, with new episodes airing weekly on Wednesdays.
