In the beginning, there was crime and people were obsessed with it and the entertainment gods said “Let there be true crime.” And it was good and soon the landscape was saturated with it and the entertainment gods said, “Let there be shows about people obsessed with true crime.” And it was meta and soon the landscape was saturated with that and the entertainment gods said, “Let there be shows about people who are so obsessed with true crime that they make shows about true crime.” And it was super-meta and as it began to saturate, critics mused, “OK, enough already.”
The show triggering this sensation of deja view is Peacock’s new comedy thriller Based on a True Story, a half-hour series that’s almost impossible to approach as anything other than Only Murders in the Building meets The Patient, only less smartly silly than the former, less moodily introspective than the latter and generally less effective than either.
Based on a True Story
The Bottom Line
Runs out of ideas before it can achieve its ‘Only Murders in Mar Vista’ aspirations.
Kaley Cuoco and Chris Messina make for a likable central pairing and the West Los Angeles setting marks a subtle detour from standard Hollywood noir. But by halfway through the show’s eight-episode first season, its attempts at shocks become repetitive and its few original ideas run out of energy.
Nathan (Messina) and Ava (Cuoco) have a decent life. They’re expecting their first child. They own a cute house in Mar Vista. But they’re unfulfilled. He’s a former tennis pro struggling to find purpose teaching bored kids and housewives at a club. She’s a realtor stuck with one-bedroom apartment listings instead of the Palisades McMansions that bring in the big commissions. Oh, and they have rusty pipes, so they have to hire hunky plumber Matt (Tom Bateman).
One of Ava’s main social outlets is a group of true crime podcast devotees. When she begins to suspect that someone she knows just might be the still-at-large Westside Ripper, instead of calling the cops, Ava senses an opportunity: Could a podcast interviewing a serial killer be a pathway to a better life or might it just be a way to put their underwhelming lives in jeopardy?
Creator Craig Rosenberg (The Boys) has crafted roles that steer into his stars’ strengths, albeit in fairly familiar ways. As she has proven time and again on the generally superior The Flight Attendant, Cuoco makes for an exceptional everywoman caught up in heightened circumstances, able to generate frazzled laughs and grounded stakes with whiplash alacrity. The actress lets her real-life pregnancy shape Ava’s physicality in amusing ways; it adds a touch of poignancy to the strained relationship between Ava and Nathan, played with trademark masculinity-gone-to-seed urgency by Messina.
The supporting cast is either underdeveloped (Bateman engages enthusiastically with a character who’s more based on other fictional characters than on anything recognizably true) or shoehorned in (as a friend defined only by yoga pants and alleged blow job aptitude, Priscilla Quintana pops up frequently with limited logic, but is often funny). Mad Man veteran Aaron Staton gets some loopy business in the home stretch, which definitely doesn’t come close to resolving what should have been a limited series.
The biggest problem is that at a certain point — specifically after a fitfully clever trip to Las Vegas for a true crime convention — Based on a True Story falls into a boring rut of threatened violence and threatened blackmail, obliterating whatever loose credulity the show had previously built up.
Rosenberg also indulges an annoying tic of sex- or murder-drenched fantasy sequences whenever the plot is lagging. While one of those, featuring a dog, is hilarious in a warped way, the tendency is to move quickly from, “Yes, this is clearly another fantasy sequence” to “If this is clearly another fantasy sequence, why is it lasting so long and why should I care?”
I get that the fantasy sequences stem from the characters and their unfulfilled lives, but Based on a True Story has better ways of illustrating a version of loneliness and aspirational impotence that the show identifies as specifically Los Angeles-based.
It’s hard to ignore the fact that loneliness and aspirational impotence are the same thing motivating the Only Murders in the Building crew, even if this show has more palm trees. The budding, needy friendship between Nathan and Matt, who both lament their invisibility — much pity for the plight of the youngish, attractive, white Los Angeleno is generated — is sweet and different enough that naturally it’s relevant for only an episode or two.
That’s more prolonged than most Based on a True Story ideas, which rush by on a road of hastily paved plot holes. The show name-checks all the right podcasts and acknowledges certain details that real podcasters will take to heart — I nodded aggressively as Ava’s preparatory notes include “Don’t use listener numbers to measure success” — before turning the genre’s ethical concerns into a series of glib punchlines. The serial killer who treats himself as a brand, using the same buzzwords as a studio pitch meeting, has a lot of similarities to the way The Boys treats its commodified superheroes. It’s a fine gimmick as far as it goes, which isn’t far enough.
The most head-scratching part of Based on a True Story is that it actually is, well, based on a true story. But if you take something true and either to protect the not-so-innocent or to beef up the drama you layer in so many tropes and clichés it becomes a sitcom, what was the point? I’ll bet the true story actually is nuts, but Only Murders in Mar Vista is closer to a footnote than a trend.
