TELEVISION/Opinion

Patricia Arquette captivates in comedy-drama TV series ‘High Desert’

Patricia Arquette (left) and Bernadette Peters play daughter and mother in "High Desert." (Hilary Bronwyn Gayle/Apple TV Plus)
Patricia Arquette (left) and Bernadette Peters play daughter and mother in "High Desert." (Hilary Bronwyn Gayle/Apple TV Plus)


Bernadette Peters and Patricia Arquette make sense as mother and daughter the moment you think of their voices. Both sometimes access a posh, low, slightly unnatural register for emphasis, and both speak with a pleasing but idiosyncratic cadence, clipping some syllables and drawing others out. One is brunette and the other blond, but they're both vivacious, clever, tricky to place in time and more than a little bit weird.

Alas, Peters' character, Roslyn, has died when the madcap first season of "High Desert," Nancy Fichman, Katie Ford and Jennifer Hoppe-House's new Apple TV+ dramedy, kicks off. Arquette plays her daughter, defender and best friend, Peggy Newman. And in Peggy TV has a new odd and utterly captivating protagonist.

With "Mommy" dead, Peggy's spiraling. She's been slowly lowering her methadone dosage to get sober, and she's shocked when her siblings, Dianne (Christine Taylor) and Stewart (Keir O'Donnell) — who had been paying the mortgage — inform her that they're selling the house she shared with their mother.

A former drug dealer, addict and hustler, Peggy — whose husband, Denny (Matt Dillon), is in prison — had been taking care of Roslyn while also working part time (with gusto, mind you, giving it her all) as a cancan dancer and stage fighter at a ramshackle amusement park called Pioneer Town.

Peggy's not exactly a model employee. She routinely flouts her downtrodden boss Owen's (Eric Petersen) rule about cellphones on the job and pillages his Keurig, and her stage maneuvers run the gamut from impressive to imprecise. But here's one thing that sets "High Desert" apart: Rather than occupy the usual range of TV workplace affects (embittered, bored, ironic), Peggy is perennially engaged. She's a felon, sure, but she finds people interesting, and she's a good sport. She takes careful note of what her co-workers do and say. She understands her boss' own set of mommy issues. Although not a particularly persuasive 1870s prostitute, she works about as hard at Pioneer Town as she does anywhere else. Her co-workers love her.

When Owen finds money missing from his safe and accuses Peggy of stealing from him, her attentiveness pays off. She notices that her colleague Tammy (Susan Park) showed up to work with breast implants — despite having just been dumped by her rich fiancé, a former news anchor who now calls himself "Guru Bob" (Rupert Friend) — and concludes that Tammy is responsible for the theft.

It is Peggy's feeling that Guru Bob, not Tammy, whose cheap $3,000 boob job is punishing her enough, should pay Owen back.

Peggy doesn't stop at solving mysteries, you see. She sets out to get vigilante justice. So she starts hunting down Guru Bob, and when it seems another co-worker is being bilked by a detective slow-walking the job she hired him to do, Peggy goes after him, too. One "case" leads to another: Peggy figures out, via a video Tammy sends her from Bob's home, that he has a stolen Picasso. In the course of pestering him to pay Tammy's debt, she figures out it's a forgery. She'll eventually figure out his wife has disappeared — and why.

To the extent that "High Desert" has a premise, this is it: Peggy's acumen, combined with her criminal experience, makes her a natural detective. She eventually negotiates with the hangdog detective Bruce (Brad Garrett) that she'll work with him, free, while she trains to become one.

It sounds like a tidy premise for a tidy show. "High Desert" has for good reason been compared to "Poker Face," another show featuring a witty, irreverent, charming lowlife who moonlights as a sleuth. Both are extremely funny. Both feature terrific actresses with great sunglasses and shag haircuts.

But the parallels end there. "Poker Face's" Charlie (Natasha Lyonne) is, in practice, almost implausibly functional, kind and effective. Peggy isn't. She's a shrewd negotiator, but her schemes backfire as often as they work. Her siblings understandably resent her lack of follow-through; she can't bring herself to sit through even one hour of detective training. Her best friend, Carol (Weruche Opia), who's sort of on the lam and living under an assumed name, goes in her stead.

It's fascinating to watch Peggy's flaws stack up. She lies. She steals. She exaggerates. She's an effective negotiator because she's a huckster: She can size up people's vulnerabilities. She drives on LSD. She more or less hijacks a bus, sure she saw her mother on it, then hijacks that Roslyn look-alike's life. After reassuring her sister Dianne that the "family home" is hers, too (and wheedling money to buy a new car because she totaled hers), she changes the locks to keep her siblings out.

She swipes other people's DoorDash orders. Confiscates a man's opioids and sells some while taking the others herself. Revels in the discovery of a dead woman's severed finger, because it means she might collect a reward.

She has also, for reasons the first season doesn't make entirely clear, lost custody of her son.

That none of this seriously imperils the viewer's willingness to follow Peggy is — in a culture that still tends to enjoy male scoundrels and discipline female ones -- a testament to Arquette's finely calibrated performance. The Oscar winner ("Boyhood") plays Peggy as variously excessive and resourceful and charming, noble, fragile, perceptive, ruinously dishonest, generous and sincere, sentimental, morally ambitious, kind and destructive. But she is, above all else, believable.


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