TIFF19 'Limetown': TV Review
reflects on Facebook's best aspects, Facebook Watch's latest original series, based on a popular mystery/suspense podcast, is awful. It's mostly a bit dull and insufficiently expansive. But ifSorry for Your Loss
Jessica Biel, a series executive producer, plays Lia Haddock, a journalist with American Public Radio. Lia has been investigating the disappearance of over 300 scientists, researchers and their families from a self-contained company town in Tennessee over a decade earlier. The mystery, which briefly dominated the headlines only to get lost in the churn of the 24-hour news cycle, fascinates Lia on a personal level because her uncle Emile was one of those who vanished.
The game in expanding podcasts to TV — a game that we're only in the nascent stages of playing — is figuring out how to keep the strengths of the initial medium and, at the same time, adding a visual component that justifies the translation at all. This is why Sam Esmail's directorial flourishes on, those appropriations of Hitchcockian grammar and '70s flair, were so essential, because they took the core of the podcast and let the series grow as its own thing.
By keeping to the running time of the podcast and keeping, initially, to the episode-by-episode structure, there's literally no room for expanding the world of the story. Having an actor with Tucci's range and recognizability as Lia's uncle provides built-in value such that you know Emile is important to the story, you have some warmth for him and you maybe wonder whether or not he's trustworthy. That has nothing to do with added dialogue or characterization. It's just Tucci.
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