The Watcher seemed like a solid idea on paper. It had the right materials: the ripped-from-The Cut true crime story set in an affluent commuter town with a preexisting sordid history. It had the right audience: worldly urbanites who have likely been strained of city life and who process their suburban ambivalence with Zillow-enabled yearning. And it had the right creative team: Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan of Glee, Ratched, and Dahmer — Monster. Combine that with the most overqualified cast assembled in one place, and you will likely have a morbid masterpiece of the streaming era.
And sure enough, The Watcher has brought the viewer numbers that have kept the limited series on Netflix’s Top 10 most-watched shows well after the week of its premiere. Of course, bringing the goods is distinct from keeping them because, much like the show’s central characters, the longer viewers stay with it, the more they come to realize what they bought into was not quite what they’d been sold.
The series takes for its narrative the true story of the Broaddus family, which, after moving into 657 Boulevard in Westfield, New Jersey, begins to receive unmarked letters from someone going by “The Watcher.” “Allow me to welcome you to the neighborhood,” the first letter began. “Do you know what lies within the walls of 657 Boulevard? Why are you here? I will find out.” More letters in increasingly ominous verbiage followed. (“I pass by many times a day. 657 Boulevard is my job, my life, my obsession. And now you are too Braddus [sic] family.”) The letters follow a mostly declamatory, accusing pattern. Indeed, The Watcher is often vague about concrete demands or intentions, besides giving fright, which is exactly what happens. The police turn up no leads, though it seems likely that a neighbor is writing them. The Broadduses spiral into obsession and paranoia in pursuit of their own investigation, which is also inconclusive. The case remains unsolved.
The Watcher is not the worst thing to happen in Westfield (more on that later), but the bizarre, open-ended case provides a sufficient gateway for broader themes that Murphy and Brennan jampack across seven episodes that feel both overly long and incomplete.
Through the Netflix prism, the Broadduses become the Brannocks, headed by Bobby Cannavale and Naomi Watts, who seek refuge from the punishing grid of Manhattan in the verdant cul-de-sacs of north Jersey. 657 Boulevard casts such a spell over them that they pay above the asking price, which requires all of their savings to make possible.
And yet, the house in the series is its most foreboding quality marker. Rather than the quaint Dutch colonial of reality (from which I live 20 minutes away), the Netflix 657 Boulevard is indistinguishable from most gaudy remodel projects. Size counts more than elegance of design. Much is made of its dumbwaiter, but there’s little else to justify the obsession not only of the Brannocks, let alone the Watcher, but also the other residents of the neighborhood: matching-tracksuited couple Margo Martindale and Richard Kind, live-in siblings Mia Farrow and Terry Kinney, real estate-obsessed English teacher Michael Nouri, and realtor Jennifer Coolidge. This may have been a conscious, thematic production choice to comment on the artificiality of the Brannocks’ aspirations, sure, or it could just have been a practical one. It’s easier to find and shoot in a big, unremarkable house. This, like many aspects of The Watcher, is not entirely clear.
Murphy and Brennan pursue two thematic routes in The Watcher that they can never comfortably get to cohere. There is the surface mystery that builds atmosphere — the series wisely uses the Watcher’s letters verbatim, made all the more unsettling in the distorted gender-neutral voice that reads them out — while piling up the expectant suspects and suspense, not to mention enough red herrings to fill a fish market. Coming behind is the suburban satire that skewers every affectation that could be culled from John Cheever’s collected works. Murphy’s Westfield is a manicured snake pit of social climbing, marital deception, financial card houses, sexual anxiety, real estate industry minutiae, property vanity, and neighbors with absolutely no sense of boundaries or basic manners.
Restraint was never one of Murphy’s virtues, but The Watcher saga might have given him too much of a good thing. Westfield’s other skeletons have struck just as strong a chord in his imagination. In 1971, Westfield resident John List decided that the solution to a series of financial setbacks was to kill his wife, his mother, and his three children and then disappear. The murders, for which List wasn’t apprehended until 1989, seeped not only into New Jersey lore but also into American popular culture, influencing The Stepfather and Keyser Söze in The Usual Suspects. They had nothing to do with the Watcher — List’s 19-room house has since been demolished — but Murphy inevitably integrates it like a living wax tableau. Less certain but plausible enough is the pigtailed Farrow and her mute Fester-like brother serving as a nod to Westfield’s more celebrated resident, Charles Addams, the cartoonist whose most famous characters became known as the Addams Family.
These nods would seem prurient if, first, New Jerseyans were not known to relish this kind of attention and if, second, they didn’t add to what is already a narrative mess. The sheer volume of sinister goings-on within that one neighborhood makes the entire bayou region of True Detective seem orderly. Horrifying deeds, such as a child-sacrificing cult, are aired, then dismissed. Some, such as a seemingly apparitional breaking-and-entering caught on camera, are simply never explained. Others defy logic altogether, such as when two characters appear to have been murdered, are given funerals, and then reappear unscathed after what was just a giant, baffling misunderstanding. Perhaps committed Murphy fans are inured to this level of frenzy, but there otherwise remains a feeling of watching a Jacobean drama written by monkeys at typewriters with a steady supply of Adderall.
When the mystery falls, the satirical safety net is not strong enough to catch it. With some revisions, The Watcher could have had some sharp observations on white flight, country club snobbery, the financial contortionism of homebuying, and the race to make your house the ugliest on the block. But as is, the series conveys a try-hard kind of wit that fails to reach the level of all that came before it. Not the fish-out-of-water unease of The Stepford Wives, the macabre burlesque of Serial Mom, or the comic but painfully familiar pathos of Welcome to the Dollhouse.
In the end, the one mind behind The Watcher that does its job most effectively is … the Watcher. No one solution to the mystery, no matter how sensible it seems, can diminish the intrigue of the mystery itself. And no Netflix-financed atmosphere can hope to equal the skin-crawling prose of the Watcher’s actual letters. The one achievement of The Watcher was in bringing those letters to more people, causing viewer and resident alike to conclude: “Maybe we shouldn’t have come here.”
Chris R. Morgan writes from New Jersey. His Twitter handle is @cr_morgan.