‘Phony’ Review: Connie Britton and Sam Nivola Lead Hulu’s Likably Quirky and Beguiling Paranoid Mystery Series

Logo text

One of the consequences of pervasive social media use and video calls or meetings is that we’re perhaps more attuned to faces — our own, our loved ones’, even strangers’ — than ever before.

It’s nearly impossible for a blind date to be truly “blind.” High school and college reunions have become borderline superfluous. If somebody gets bangs or grows a beard or goes on Ozempic or remains bizarrely untouched by the ravages of time, we tend to be aware. It’s harder to go incognito in the world, and it’s difficult for somebody to change without our noticing.

The very modern discomfort and sense of the uncanny provoked by an unexpected and nearly imperceptible alteration is at the heart of Phony, a new genre hybrid from Hulu.

Half paranoid thriller and half coming-of-age comedy, Phony isn’t exactly gripping and it’s rarely hilarious. Instead, it initially occupies a very likable middle ground in which life and death stakes, a young ensemble of perfectly cast relative unknowns (plus Connie Britton and Sam Nivola), and a dildo-hoarding beaver can engage and intersect.

Critics have been sent four episodes from the eight-episode first season — exactly the right amount for me to know I’ll be checking out the second half of the season to see which of various landings the show’s creative team is able to stick. At the same time, it’s easy to see all the ways Phony could fall apart, from an unsatisfyingly resolved central mystery to the contrasting sins of deciding to take itself too seriously or not seriously enough.

For now, though, the potential of this clever and brisk series, which calls to mind everything from TBS’ Search Party to Apple’s Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed to Amazon’s recent reimagining of Carrie, is ample.

Phony was created by Nick Paley, one of the writers of the brilliantly pensive Marcel the Shell With Shoes On, with Anthony King (the second Jury Duty season) serving as co-showrunner.

The White Lotus breakout Nivola plays Sonny, an endearingly dorky-yet-popular student at a high school somewhere in the Northwest. (Oregon, I think?)

Sonny has found a way to be friendly to and friends with much of the school, paying close attention to his classmates’ personal dramas and helping out whenever possible.

He’s best friends with a temporarily injured jock (Maliq Johnson’s Vogel) and he and his girlfriend (Mahaela Park’s Chloe) are about to take the next step in their relationship. (Sex. They’re about to have sex.)

The key figure in Sonny’s life, though, is his mother Ellen (Britton). As a single mom and principal at Sonny’s high school, Ellen is very, very intimately involved. And that’s okay, since their relationship is thoroughly sweet, albeit co-dependent.

Then, a downed tree — the handiwork of the aforementioned dildo-loving beaver — causes Sonny to drive off the road, totaling his car and putting him in a coma.

After a week, Sonny regains consciousness. Everything seems normal, except for a pretty big problem: Sonny is convinced that his mother has changed — that she is, in fact, an imposter pretending to be his mother.

Naturally, there’s a lot of skepticism, which causes Sonny to reach outside of his main friend circle, forming a bond with Mallory (Grace Brennan), a Seventh-Day Adventist returning to school after several years of home-schooling; Mallory’s geeky and open-minded cousin Weldon (Colter Lee); and Sharla (Meera Syal), a conspiracy-theorizing private investigator.

The questions raised so far include whether or not Ellen is or isn’t an imposter of some sort; if she is an imposter, what the imposter’s motivations are; and if she isn’t an imposter, what it means in terms of Sonny’s post-accident trauma.

Paley, who wrote and directed the first two episodes, quickly establishes a mood of uncertainty, and Nivola’s performance swiftly takes him from appealing Everyteen to a Hitchcockian ordinary (young) man caught up in an extraordinary situation. By the end of the four episodes I’ve seen, a lot of the ambiguity has been stripped, some of it by cheating away from Sonny’s exclusive perspective in a way that I don’t think benefits the storytelling.

Part of that is because with shows like this, I will always err on the side of uncertainty and textual openness, while those same shows tend to err on the side of giving answers to impatient viewers. Watching Phony, I was caught up in the nebulous mystery and, thus far, less and less intrigued by the concrete mystery. A lot of my pleasure came from Paley refusing to come out and underline ways that Ellen might or might not have changed, letting viewers spend a lot of time staring at Britton, unable to tell with complete certainty if anything was done to augment her appearance.

You could tell me that in some shots she’s wearing contacts or that her eyebrows were colored and I’d believe you. But I’d be just as credulous if you said that Britton’s face is like one of those words where the longer you look at it, even the correct spelling begins to look wrong. Britton is resisting playing anything conclusively, and the show is all the better for the built-in warmth that TV viewers feel for any Connie Britton role. Like Sonny, we think we know what to expect from her.

At some point, Phony is going to simply come out and say, “Here’s what happened and here’s how we either did or didn’t trick you and why,” and I’m not eager for the clarification. Other viewers, I’m sure, will be looking for hints and clues, trying to figure out the story.

I made no effort to figure out the story, in part because, as a high-school dramedy, Phony is quite satisfying. Nivola escalates his performance well, and I think it’s by design that Sonny feels like a character in a TV show or movie while every other young person in the cast just feels like a normal teen. Brennan, Park, Lee and Johnson convey effortless naturalism, even if their characters are just a hair prettier and quippier than your average kid. Even when Sonny begins investigating with Mallory and Weldon, they make a set of dumb mistakes and flawed logical leaps that befit their age and academic level, rather than instantly becoming adept junior gumshoes.

Add American Vandal and A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder as comparisons one might happily make to Phony.

There’s a darkness at the show’s center, but Paley and subsequent director Tazbah Chavez (Reservation Dogs) never let anything become too solemn. So far. Episodes are all in the half-hour range, and they move fast. I thought, a few times, that I wouldn’t mind a few extra minutes per episode to live in this world, to acknowledge the different background members of the high-school ensemble. But I usually came back around to liking that we know a little about the kid who’s constantly juggling or doing magic just outside the main narrative, but not too much. Or that we don’t get bogged down in the psychology of a boy named Shovel whose response to possibly spotting a dead body is to throw a dead body-themed party, rather than going to the police.

So far, the show has done well keeping its thematic underpinnings subtle and unarticulated. It’s a show in which the very modern idea with which I led this review is there, but nobody needs to say it. Nobody needs to talk about high school as a place where everybody and everything is changing, but that changes to the grown-ups around you would be most unnerving. It’s all just baked in.

I hope that Phony can remain light on its feet going forward. The truth about Ellen is inevitable and how Paley and company handle that truth will determine if Phony is a quirky little yarn or something better and more substantive. I’ll be curious to see where it lands.