It’s a shame Hulu shared only half the first season of the streamer’s new comedy-mystery series “Phony” with critics in advance, because so much depends on how the show resolves its central source of suspense. The premise is what one character calls a “reverse cuckoo situation,” or at least a potential one: When Sonny (Sam Nivola), a high-school student in the Pacific Northwest, gets into a nasty car crash, he wakes up a week later to a surreal nightmare. His mother, Ellen (Connie Britton), has been replaced by someone else, and nobody around him seems to notice. Is he crazy, or is everyone else blind?
At first, “Phony” creator Nick Paley, who directed half the season and penned the first couple of episodes, plays into the ambiguity of Sonny’s possible delusion. Obviously, a child who recently suffered a serious head trauma is far from a reliable narrator, and in the premiere, Paley leans into the subjectivity with distorted sound and imagery. When the camera inhabits Sonny’s point of view, as it does almost constantly in the beginning, Ellen does, in fact, look different: thanks to the magic of visual effects, Britton’s eyebrows, nose and other features are all subtly altered, and the changes played up with side-by-side comparisons.
The distortions are especially striking given the actor’s pre-existing place in the pantheon of TV moms. (Britton also serves as an executive producer here.) Ellen is also the principal of Sonny’s high school, and a warm-but-firm educator naturally evokes Tami Taylor, even if Oregon is thousands of miles and metaphorical light-years away from West Texas. Subtly tweaking Britton’s face and voice is effectively uncanny, because viewers have such a deep knowledge of her mannerisms from “Friday Night Lights” and other shows. But for “Phony,” depriving itself of Britton’s full expressive powers cuts both ways. We’re supposed to feel their absence, and do. And yet when it comes to understanding Sonny and Ellen’s relationship, particularly while we don’t understand what actually happened to Ellen and why, the audience is met with just that: an absence.
Before the crash, we get a few scenes that establish the status quo of Ellen and Sonny’s relationship. As a single mom and her only child, they’re a tightly knit pair, with Ellen respectful yet wary of Sonny’s growing autonomy. Not that Sonny knows what to do with that independence: He’s an inveterate people-pleaser, insistently upbeat in a way his peers know is “a little full of shit” but unable to stop himself from adapting to suit whoever’s in front of him. Ellen and Sonny’s maybe-final fight goes down when she finds the sex toy he bought in anticipation of sleeping with his girlfriend Chloe (Mahaela Park), because he thinks that’s what he’s supposed to do.
Given that so much about Ellen (or is it “Ellen”?) is physically and figuratively obscured, Nivola — Britton’s fellow “The White Lotus” alum, though the two appeared on separate seasons — ends up shouldering the lion’s share of the show. He’s up to the task, giving Sonny a sweetly nervous energy and even some slapstick as he runs around in search of the truth. The tone of “Phony” is lighter and more comedic than one would expect of the horror-adjacent premise, if reflective of Paley’s CV, which includes credits for co-writing “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On” and directing on “Broad City.” Episodes are a zippy half-hour, and unfold in a world where a teen spotting a corpse in the woods is an occasion for a “dead body party” with a massage line. With its evergreen forests and ominous shots of beavers subbing in for owls, “Twin Peaks” is a clear influence, but the predominant vibe is less eerie than benignly kooky.
Too insecure to confide in Chloe or his best friend Vogel (Maliq Johnson), Sonny instead finds investigative partners in cousins Mallory (Grace Brennan) and Weldon (Colter Lee), social outcasts — she’s an ex-homeschooler from an evangelical family, he’s just a weirdo — who prove open to his theories. A sympathetic ear is always nice, but the trio doesn’t accomplish much in the season’s first half besides hiring Sharla (Meera Syal), a “private investigator” whose chief qualification is her enthusiastic posts in conspiracy forums.
“Phony” nonetheless starts offering hints that Sonny may be onto something. Circumstantial evidence (this Ellen doesn’t return Sonny’s customary triple squeeze) gives way to more objective indicators. Even in scenes outside Sonny’s perspective, Ellen still looks like not-quite-Connie Britton, fielding suspicious phone calls and making covert trips to the bank. “Phony” probably couldn’t draw out the question of whether Sonny is imagining things or not for eight entire episodes, but by the point the screeners stopped, the show is in an awkward lull: too far in to be intriguingly open-ended, not far in enough to judge the journey by its destination.
Without knowing not-Ellen’s origins, MO or motivations (or what happened to actual Ellen!), it’s hard to tell what “Phony” is even about, and therefore how well it executes a self-assigned brief. Is the show a coming-of-age story about Sonny learning to listen to his instincts? Is it a family story about how adolescence turns parents and kids into strangers? Is it something much weirder altogether? “Phony” provokes a mild curiosity, rather than a burning urgency, to find out which. Partially handicapping Britton turns out to be a big sacrifice.
The first two episodes of “Phony” are now streaming on Hulu, with new episodes airing weekly on Tuesdays.