![]() Then he gets fired because someone sends his boss a video of a strange woman slipping into bed with Dean. Dean admits to sending a single note, but not the original ones. Episodes after we, and the Brannocks, watch paramedics haul away two bloody bodies from Mitch and Mo’s house, it turns out they were just out of town their troubled adult son faked their deaths. While the big mystery never gets solved, little ones often do-in ways that only make the letters seem like less of an anomaly. Instead of inventing a pat conclusion, Murphy and Brennan capitalize on the shaggy-dogness of it all. That the real Watcher has never been apprehended might seem like a liability, but it actually becomes an asset. ![]() Then there’s real-estate agent Karen (Jennifer Coolidge, maintaining her post- White Lotus Jenaissance momentum), an old classmate of Nora’s who espouses a sort of demented-girlboss wealth gospel and seems overly eager to earn a second commission by reselling the house. Elsewhere in the neighborhood, historical-preservation control freak Pearl ( Mia Farrow) takes the Brannocks’ interior design choices personally, while her emotionally disturbed brother Jasper (Terry Kinney) hides in their disused dumbwaiter. The prickly couple next door, Mitch and Mo (Richard Kind and Margo Martindale, a match made in TV heaven), wear absurd matching outfits, orient their lawn chairs so that they’re staring directly at the Brannocks’ house, and brazenly harvest arugula on the family’s property. Protagonists Nora ( Naomi Watts) and Dean Brannock (Bobby Cannavale) and their kids, 16-year-old Ellie (Isabel Gravitt) and her little brother Carter (Luke David Blumm), are surrounded by weirdos. The show magnifies that sense of community dysfunction. One disconcerting aspect of the article is that, rather than uncovering too few suspects in a town that prides itself on safety, it finds too many. The Watcher does what good psychological thrillers do: it takes everyday fears to nightmarish extremes. And Murphy restrains himself from abusing it with the kind of baroque inanity that makes so many of his recent shows so exhausting. There’s no question that such creative license was necessary (the real family never even moved into the house). ![]() Characters are added, subtracted, composited, and embellished to better serve an all-star cast as well as a plot that examines each suspect in turn. They alter not just the names of the family, which has already suffered through an unauthorized Lifetime movie called The Watcher, but also the number of kids and their ages. These facts form the skeleton of Murphy and co-creator Ian Brennan’s series, but unlike so many other docudramas, The Watcher breaks early and often from the official record. Unsolved when the original article ran, the case remains a mystery in 2022. Eventually, scared out of their wits and facing ever-worsening financial straits, they put the house up for sale. Along with making vague threats centered on the children-or, as the Watcher calls them, “young blood”-in the family, the letters posed such chilling questions as: “Do you know what lies within the walls of 657 Boulevard?” There were plenty of suspicious neighbors, but the local police seemed pretty apathetic, even as weird things kept happening. In the real-life story, they started receiving typed notes from a correspondent identified only as the Watcher, who claimed to have been watching their property for “the better part of two decades,” as their father and grandfather had done before them. An adaptation of Reeves Wiedeman’s eerie New York magazine article from 2018, The Watcher follows a family that buys a dream home in the wealthy suburb of Westfield, NJ, only to find that someone else has already, in a sense, laid claim to it.
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