4 out of 5

Developed by: Alexandra Cunningham and Kevin J. Hynes

A modern update of Fatal Attraction would not have been on my logical shortlist. This particular brands of erotic thriller seems especially of the past; not exactly the same as any given ‘nostalgic’ update of other 80s / 90s properties, and questionable in its aims. The “lazy” take would be to do a gender-swapped version; a more nuanced approach might explore power and gender dynamics, but my worry there would be that it would / could get pretty ham-fisted, especially if trying to maintain, in whatever way, the titillations of its inspiration. Finding out that this would be a series both made me more skeptical and alternately curious – okay, so, how do you expand this concept past a couple hours?

Thankfully, there are actually some dang smart people in Hollywood – certainly smarter than me – who found a way to navigate this into a fascinating, and appreciably complex, explosion of the original flick, allowing for all sides of the plot – the sex, the intrigue, the psychology – to shine through, giving them more grounding by doing something that should’ve been obvious to me, but handling it with patience and a relative thoroughness uncommon in most shows: Fatal Attraction explores all sides by… exploring all sides, giving us points of view from each of the main players to better describe how these things came to be, and doing some braver dives into background so as to not cleanly paint a good guy / bad guy picture.

Fatal Attraction’s story remains the same, with some detail tweaks: DA Dan Gallagher (Joshua Jackson) has a good job, a great, supportive wife, Beth (Amanda Peet), and a pretty brilliant daughter. But he gets a boo-boo at work, and with a bruised ego, follows some flirtations into an affair with colleague Alex Forrest (Lizzy Caplan). This goes fine until it doesn’t, when breaking things off with Alex proves difficult, and she starts showing up more aggressively in Dan’s life… The other half of the show is the “rest” of the movie’s story: after Dan has served his prison sentence of over a decade for the murder of Alex Forrest. He’s released after showing penitence and good behavior, then soon teams up with his old cop friend, Mike (Toby Huss) to reopen his case and prove his innocence, while also reconnecting with Beth and his daughter, Ellen (Alyssa Jirrels).

From the outset, series developers Alexandra Cunningham and Kevin J. Hynes show a willingness to balance the old with the new: the first couple of episodes of Fatal Attraction essentially outline the affair, and we’re allowed to linger and look, the visuals respectful but not shy, and playing up the building attraction between Dan and Alex through several lustful interactions, and the inevitable attempted end, when Dan sees things are more serious than he wanted, and bows out.

Except we know, already, how this will end.

And so here, while events in the past tick forward to that conclusion, the show starts bouncing around between POVs, showing us how different this whole thing looked to Alex – flirtatious, yes, but not alone in bringing the affair to fruition, and certainly acknowledging the power dynamics not just between her and Dan, but in all her relationships; all her interactions – and how it looked to Beth, and how it looked to Mike and so on. This isn’t done in a strict Lost fashion; the story is allowed to bounce around as needed, using characters as anchors to inform different parts of its story. And both Jackson and Caplan are fantastic at this, each willing to allow their characters to wallow in the very human greys of morality, Jackson amazingly showing off how Dan’s “nice guy” exterior is backed by bravado that cannot (in the past) comprehend how he’s not ‘winning’, or (in the present) how wrong he’d gotten everything. Caplan has an even more difficult task, as Alex does fit a stereotype of “crazy” that the original movie absolutely went in on, and here we get to unpack, not denying her issues but trying to treat them as evidence of trauma, and not crazy-girlfriend shtick. (Something that Glenn Close obviously keyed in on however many years ago, so, thanks, we’re only just catching up now.)

This is very funly paralleled with a legit mystery – if Dan didn’t kill Alex, then who did? – and we get to use the above explorations to pick at that at well, which allows some full circle thoughts on the legacy of our actions, both direct and indirect; the obvious and the subtle.

Agreeing with other reviews of the conclusion, because the series was more concerned with a modern examination of this affair – a much more character-focused, balanced, sociological approach – I’m assuming there was a thought that we needed some stinger to end on, and so a final punch feels a bit unnecessary. It makes sense from a top-down view of the show’s themes, but there was a more subtle version that I think would’ve actually hit harder, and the version they went with arguably goes against the show’s more realistic m.o. Given that it’s relegated to the final minutes, and is something of a post-script, I’m content not allowing it affect my feelings on the majority of the show’s 8 hours. As an additional criticism, though, we run into the problem we always will with remakes: the need to include particular images / lines as nods can feel pretty forced. I get it. And I’m sure we’d be asking “…but what about?” if these things weren’t included, but, like, that rabbit was pretty superfluous.

All in all, this was the way to do this. I was never not impressed by Jackson and Caplan, and Peet and Huss in their supporting roles are equally phenomenal, with Jirrels also bringing something very weighty to a difficult role – her character has to carry quite a bit of emotional weight at a distance, as she somewhat acts as the audience surrogate for a bit, watching events from afar. The court sequences are strong, the erotic stuff is sufficiently erotic (at least for a 40 year old dude who doesn’t need more than that), and, surely most importantly, the dialogue and the way it’s brought to life felt very, very real, and made me feel like there were real people with real stakes wrapped up in these events.