The Peripheral Season One Review

After watching six of the eight episodes of The Peripheral – a new sci-fi puzzlebox drama from Prime Video – I honestly don’t know what to make of the show. An adaptation of William Gibson’s book of the same name (part of a series of books, which one presumes Prime is hoping to adapt further should this first season prove to be a hit), the series comes from Scott Smith (who wrote all eight episodes of its debut season) and the producing duo of Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy (the duo behind the complex and often baffling puzzlebox series Westworld over on HBO), offering flashes of intrigue, some interesting characters and performances, and a whole lot of confusion that doesn’t feel justified or worth your time. But, like many shows of its ilk, I desperately found myself wanting more of certain corners of the series while being more and more disappointed that the series seemed content to focus on the parts that weren’t all that interesting at all.

But let’s start at the beginning. The Peripheral centers on Flynne (Chloe Grace Moretz, wasted as an audience surrogate early in the story and wasted even more when the writing suddenly decides she’s a fully realized character without putting in the work later in the season), a young woman living in the Blue Mountains in 2032. Times are hard and she’s trying to take care of her terminally ill mother and her PTSD-addled ex-Marine brother. But things take a turn when she’s asked to test out a new VR headset (well, her brother is, but she’s really the VR savant, so she’s doing it – just one example of how the series needlessly complicates things that could be straightforward) for a nice chunk of change. In this VR world, London in the late 21^st century, Flynne finds herself in an exact replica of her brother, Burton’s, body, participating in a heist at the behest of a mysterious Aelita (Charlotte Riley, having a hell of time in the role, and easily the most compelling of the show’s cast of characters). Only, it turns out, this isn’t a simple VR simulation. Instead, Flynne’s consciousness has actually traveled to the future, housed in a “peripheral” body made to look like her brother.

From there, the story seesaws between the present and the future, with Flynne’s mind jumping to the future in a peripheral body when the plot demands it (usually for important expositional dumps via Gary Carr’s Wilf, who serves as a caretaker/potential love interest for Flynne – if only the pair had a modicum of chemistry) and threats being unleashed on Flynne, Burton, and their friends and family in their present at the orders of shady folks from the future (chief among them, T’Nia Miller’s Cherise, another incredibly intriguing character who is given far too little screen time). All of this sounds complicated on paper and let me tell you, it’s even more complicated when you see it playing out on screen. There are too many characters fighting for precious little screen time that your head will start to spin by episode three, and you’ll also come to a crucial realization: Only one of these timelines actually makes for compelling television.

The series wants us to be drawn into the world of Flynne – it wants us to care about her, her family and friends, and her desire to simply live her life without the threat of being pulled into a war with the future. Unfortunately, it doesn’t spend nearly enough time filling in the gaps in Flynne’s world. We get the basic outline of characters, relationships, and Moretz does her damnedest to turn a one-dimensional Mary Sue into someone we can root for. But the characters that pop off the screen and make you want to watch more are the supporting cast from the future. Aelita, Cherise, JJ Field’s mysterious but delightful Lev, and Alexandra Billings’ charismatic as hell Inspector Ainsley Lowbeer (who doesn’t even make her first appearance until episode six) draw your eye, your focus, and make you wish the rest of the story was populated with such interesting characters. These are the people who have motives, opportunity, who make the choices that drive the plot and entice you to focus closely on their actions. When they are on screen, you sit up and take notice.

And that’s the central problem with the series – we aren’t given a reason to want our heroes (Flynne and Burton) to win. Good television writing provides us with characters we can understand, who we root for, who we want to get to know better. The Peripheral gives us a flashy narrative (people from the past get sucked into a war in the future!) but fails to do the world building around our characters to make them compelling enough to watch when the show needs to spend time providing us with the heaps of exposition (and my god, is there a lot of exposition – after all, the show is building two worlds for us, one in the near future and one 70 years beyond) necessary so that we can get a basic grasp on what is going on (which, to be frank, it took me a couple of run throughs of certain conversations to understand just why Cherise was trying to get to Flynne in the past – which, also not great writing there).

If you’re familiar with Nolan and Joy’s previous shows – Westworld and Person of Interest, to name the two The Peripheral most reminds me off – you’ll know that over-complicated puzzlebox shows are a thing they are attracted to. And while Scott Smith is the showrunner of this series, Nolan and Joy’s penchant for over complicating a story that could be a great deal simpler seems to have rubbed off on him. I had foolishly hoped that since there was a book to provide a narrative structure this series might be less of a slog and more streamlined. Alas, that hasn’t been the case thus far. There’s an interesting concept at the heart of the series – and there are some interesting reveals that I can’t get into here that only serve to make me wish the series had scrapped much of its present storyline and chosen instead to focus solely on the future aspect, where the most compelling characters and most interesting plot points reside.

There’s nothing wrong with simplifying a story to bring out its most interesting aspects. Here, with too much story, too many characters, and too much puzzle and not enough reveal, The Peripheral is another case of not knowing when to edit down to focus on the key points. Sure, having a book as source material can tie the hands of the writers, but there’s an interesting story to be told hidden among the excess. It’s a shame we aren’t getting to see that instead of what is on the screen.

The Peripheral premieres on Friday, October 21 on Prime Video. The series will be released weekly. Six of the eight episodes in season one were provided for review.