When a thriller starts with something as simple as a father being suspicious of the man dating his daughter, you know that there will be some twists and turns before we get to the conclusion. But how many twists can a show take when it consists of only four 45-minute episodes, like the new Acorn series The Catch has?
THE CATCH: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: A shot of a lighthouse in a shore town.
The Gist: A fisherman named Ed (Jason Watkins) seems to desperately want his boat to go faster; he sees a raft in the water, says the name “Josh”, and fishes it out. No one is there. He’s thinking about his young son (Jacob Hickey), whom he lost some years ago. His business partner Bob (Ian Pirie) brings him back into the here and now.
Back at home, Abbie (Poppy Gilbert), the daughter of Ed and his wife Claire (Cathy Belton), comes by to introducer her new boyfriend, Ryan (Aneurin Barnard) to her family. This includes Claire’s mother Phyllis (Brenda Fricker), who is in the beginning stages of cognitive decline. He seems perfect: Handsome, well-educated, empathetic, has money. He is aiming to live in this seaside town for at least a year and wants Abbie to live with him. Ed meets Ryan and immediately thinks he’s too good to be true.
Ed has been tough on Abbie’s boyfiends, most notably George (Morgan Palmeria), a lifeguard Abbie dated for years before breaking up with him. He still has her as the lock screen on his phone. When Ed encounters George on the beach trying to save a swimmer, he of course flashes back to when Josh died, and his attempts to revive his son. Later, George volunteers to find out what he can about Ryan.
George manages to find a tidbit about Ryan changing his name when he was 18, but Ryan has an explanation for that. Not satisfied, Ed follows Ryan another night after he tells Abbie he’s busy for work and watches him pick up a sex worker. When confronted, though, Ryan also has an explanation.
In the meantime, someone is sabotaging Ed and Bob’s boat; it might end up being the final blow to their fishing business given that they’ve lost some restaurant contracts. But Ed finds out that someone is reminding him of a death that happened during his naval days decades ago.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Catch is like other twisty mystery thrillers on Acorn, like The Nest.
Our Take: The first episode of The Catch, created by Michael Crompton based on T.M. Logan’s novel, starts of with a pretty basic plot: Dad mistrusts daughter’s new beau, new beau looks too good to be true. In and of itself, it’s not a bad place to start this story, but it feels like the first episode squanders momentum by continuing to examine just how little Ed trusts anyone who dates his daughter, which might be fueled by grief over losing his son.
The first episode basically consists of Ed making an ass out of himself, trying everything he can to discredit Ryan. But we know that his suspicions are probably right; Crompton’s script doesn’t exactly do much to hide the fact that Ryan is up to something sketchy. So it becomes one person trying to get everyone around him to see the truth, which will become increasingly frustrating to watch as Ryan lies his way out of the situations that it seems only Ed saw.
The other major part of the story, which is Ed getting implicated in a death while he was in the Royal Navy, doesn’t really get going until the very end of the episode. Someone is definitely after him, knowing something that Ed likely wanted hidden for the last 30 or so years. When he finds a picture of his naval days on the boat’s bridge and the word “KILLER” scrawled in red on the deck, that becomes pretty obvious.
Of course, there’s every reason to believe that the two major stories are connected; there are reasons why Ryan wants to live in town, and why, for instance, he happened to be on the docks to save Phyllis from falling in the water after she wandered off. Given that the series is only four episodes running about 45 minutes each, it probably won’t take long before something along those lines is revealed. And if Ryan doesn’t have anything to do with these threats, we hope that the way we get to the real perpetrator makes sense.
Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.
Parting Shot: Ed sees the creepy inscription on the deck of his fishing boat.
Sleeper Star: Poppy Gilbert is asked to be sexy and romantic one minute, angry the next, and she’ll be on a rollercoaster of emotions as Abbie.
Most Pilot-y Line: Ryan’s excuse for seeing the sex worker seems especially implausible, and we thought it was strange that Abbie and Claire were inclined to give Ryan the benefit of the doubt on that one.
Our Call: STREAM IT. What we hope is that The Catch gives us a couple of twists and turns that makes it less predictable than we think it’s going to be after watching the first episode.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
