Female power, sly and sharp metaphors and sex with a duck are all things an audience can find in Apple TV+’s series “Roar.”
“Roar” is a star-studded anthology that follows eight eccentric women living in fables, based on the 2018 novel “Roar” by Cecelia Ahern.
The series, created by 2017 series “GLOW’s” directors Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch, features eight half-hour-long episodes that tell stories about what it’s like to be a woman in the weirdest way.
The titles are so bizarre: “The Woman Who Ate Photographs,” (with lead actress Nicole Kidman) “The Woman Who Was Put On The Shelf,” (Betty Gilpin) and “The Woman Who Was Fed By a Duck,” (Merritt Wever).
Take these titles seriously and literally because it’s exactly what happens.
The audience sees Kidman shove photographs in her mouth to relive her memories. There’s not a moment when you realize the metaphor, which is that “she desires the comfort from the past and misses when things were simple.”
It’s clear to the audience that’s exactly what she’s doing. She just ate a photograph, of course that’s what she’s thinking.
My favorite episode was by far the weirdest, “The Woman Who Was Fed By a Duck.”
The woman in the episode, Elisa, played by Merritt Wever, is constantly bombarded with questions from her sister about her dating life. One day Elisa is sitting on the park bench and hangs up the phone with her sister because the sister received a call from her children.
Elisa tries to feed a duck bread and the duck makes a joke, speaking to her. They start to date, the duck becomes toxic and it’s one hell of a story about self-worth.
Creators Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch were strongly committed to making the image simple, and the metaphors real and mystifying.
I love that all of the themes tackled feelings of grief, guilt, beauty and love. It made me, as a woman, not feel alone. Yes, that’s cheesy but I’ve felt really weird and still struggle with the same problems depicted in the show such as being ignored and figuring out what I want in life.
But I think some episodes turned out better than others.
“The Woman Who Returned Her Husband” and “The Girl Who Loved Horses” for example were a bit boring. The ending to “The Woman Who Disappeared” was underwhelming.
The promotion for this series was also disappointing. The cast and the stories are energetic and powerful but AppleTV+ dropped the ball on promoting it for reasons I can’t fathom.
I could do promotion for this show better than AppleTV+ could. You have amazing writers whose show got canceled by Netflix and you’re not promoting that they’re now working with you on their first show after COVID-19-related regulations began to lessen?
Not to mention, the cast has Emmy and Oscar-nominated actresses including Betty Gilpin, who is a three-time Emmy nominee for her role as Debbie Eagan on “GLOW.”
This show is too stylized to be for everyone. An audience is either OK with having a duck orally please a woman or they’re not.
Overall, for the show itself, I’d rate it three and a half stars. It was strangely interesting but I found some of the episodes to be empty.
I thought the cast would carry the show but the themes and the weird vibes overpowered the amazing actresses. I didn’t say, “Look at Alison Brie solve her own murder,” in the episode about a woman who solved her own murder. I was more focused on how most men don’t listen to women when it doesn’t involve their own interests or benefits.
If it’s not clear by now, this show is weird which is why I think people should support it because we’re all socially weird freaks that need something to watch and talk about.
