The protagonist of Phony, a delightfully genre-defying Hulu series best miscategorized as a thriller, is the kind of teenage boy any mother would brag about. Played by Sam Nivola, who’s best known for portraying gentle sons of privilege in The White Lotus and The Perfect Couple, Sonny Cooke is that one kid everyone in school knows and likes. He’s as comfortable with the jocks as he is with the theater set; his friendly, nonjudgmental presence sets his peers at ease. You’d think this would be especially tough to achieve when your mom, Connie Britton’s Ellen, is the principal, but if anything, the proximity of a single parent with whom he shares a fierce bond adds to his ease. “I actually love high school,” he narrates over a montage of happy moments that opens the show. “I know what people need to hear, and people trust me with their sh-t.”
That’s before one anxiously anticipated night upends Sonny’s pleasant life. Driving to his girlfriend Chloe’s (Mahaela Park) house, with plans to have sex for the first time and a blue vibrator in tow as a sort of talisman against performance anxiety, he crashes into an eerie pond. When he awakens in the hospital a week later, banged up but healing, the woman who greets him looks slightly yet decisively different from the mother he knows better than anyone. (Britton’s subtle transformation is rendered, quite effectively, through a combination of makeup and visual effects.) No one else seems to notice the change. They chalk up Sonny’s insistence that this new Ellen is a phony to the lingering effects of his accident. He fights with his skeptical best friend, Vogel (Maliq Johnson), and drifts toward outsiders Mallory (Grace Brennan), a junior-high love interest who’s back in class after years of being homeschooled by evangelical parents, and her geeky cousin, Weldon (Colter Lee), who are bored enough to help investigate.
With its cliffhangers and deceptions, Phony has the bones of a thriller. But since a big part of the mystery is whether Ellen’s new face is the result of a crime, some supernatural occurrence, or truly all in Sonny’s head, it can’t lean on the overused conventions of any particular thriller subgenre. Instead, its comedy-veteran showrunners, creator Nick Paley (Marcel the Shell With Shoes On, Broad City) and Anthony King (The Afterparty, Rooster), give their half-hour series the vibe of a coming-of-age dramedy, albeit a decidedly uncanny one. There’s a lot of humor, often of the awkward-adolescent variety, in the characters, performances, and dialogue. “I decided to go vegan when I found out that cows have best friends,” Chloe rambles to Mallory, in a stiff early interaction. “And then I saw this cow get its head cut off.” A party that spans most of a midseason episode recalls the shambolic outdoor rager in Dazed and Confused, with groups of kids intoxicatedly yapping and clumsily flirting.
That this atmosphere feels natural—grounding Sonny’s crisis in the real social world of teens’ funny, stressful, horny, mundane, phone-mediated daily lives—rather than painfully quirky, is a testament to the show’s delicate execution. People have idiosyncrasies. Sonny and Chloe call each other Bobo; his mom used to cook him a dish they refer to, without expository intervention, as Chicken Nummers. The school counselor (Kelvin Yu) is a frustrated musician, and his faux-casual attempts to get students to listen to his record are played for laughs, but he’s not just a joke. In fact, Paley and King almost always resist tired tropes. Nothing would be easier than a Chloe-Sonny-Mallory love triangle straight out of every teen drama ever. But that’s not the way these relationships are written. The characters are too specific to disappear into clichés.
Because Hulu provided half of the eight-episode season to critics (and because only a monster would put a spoiler of that level in a review even if they did have access to the information), I don’t know how the mystery of Ellen and her doppelgänger is resolved. While early signs do point to an explanation more compelling than, say, it was all just a dream, I’m pleased to say that, midway through, the possibilities still seem endless. I don’t think I’d be too upset about an anticlimax, anyway. The vividness and humor Phony finds in the school community makes the process of getting to the big reveal a pleasure in itself. As is watching Britton and Nivola, the prototypical TV mom and son, alternately playing into and against their respective types.
Besides, there’s a perceptive story of self-discovery unfurling in the background that may prove to be more important, thematically speaking, than what became of Ellen. Sonny’s conviction that his mom is a fake destabilizes his personality and habits enough to illuminate how he’s been faking it, in a social sense. So eager is he to make others happy that he shifts views depending on who he’s talking to and worries about Chloe having a good first sexual experience to the exclusion of valuing his own. “I don’t even have strong opinions!” he insists. The idea that growing up means developing a self distinct from the person other people want you to be isn’t new to the coming-of-age canon. Yet here it’s approached from an angle, and with a degree of perceptiveness, that I didn’t see coming. In our rigidly genre-bound times, when few shows that call themselves thrillers surprise us in any way, Phony is something genuinely new on TV.