Zany, wacky, romping, bizarre, shaggy, funny, meta, surprisingly profound, wild, outlandish, gorgeous, messy, big-swinging jumble, screwball, fun yet frustrating, raucous.
Never let it be said that we critics are unfamiliar with the dictionary. The above list of adjectives are all pulled from the ledes of various reviews from respected publications of the new series Mrs. Davis; and boy are they rather shallow ways of describing Mrs. Davis. My apologies in advance to these writers for using their reviews to make a point, but I’ve noticed something in the way this show has been written about that I feel invites further exploration. But first, my own attempt at describing a show many feel to be close to indescribable:
From renowned writer/director Damon Lindelof (Lost, The Leftovers, Watchmen) and writer Tara Hernandez (Big Bang Theory), Mrs. Davis is a show about a world where an AI assistant has reorganized the entire world into a state of harmony and peace. This AI, known as Mrs. Davis, has few opponents; a reclusive sect of nuns and a very Proud Boys but not horrible maybe (?) paramilitary group seem to be the only ones left trying to oppose its world domination. One of those nuns is Sister Simone and it is upon her that Mrs. Davis decides to focus her/its attention. Simone is a nonbeliever in Mrs. Davis and a firm believer in God, so when Mrs. Davis offers Simone a quest that would result in the AI self-destructing, Simone warily accepts. The quest is, of course, a quest for the Holy Grail.
The way in which this story is told is oftentimes zany, wacky, bizarre, funny, meta, messy, gorgeous, screwball, fun but frustrating…. etc. but these terms pull forward the aesthetics of the show while often hesitating to dip below the surface and bring anything up from the show’s depths. In a recap of episode five for Vulture, the audience is expressly bidden to “not try and suss out Mrs. Davis’ ridiculous twists and turns, let them wash over you.” In an earlier review, the same author writes,
If you came for the simple pleasures of watching Betty Gilpin ride a motorcycle in a nun’s habit while bad guys try to catch her with a giant butterfly net or else they’ll blow up her beloved white horse with a suicide-bomber vest without wanting to think too deeply about any of it, then my friend, you’ve come to the right place.
Other reviewers describe the show as a “live-action Looney Toons” or the equivalent of dumping a “5,000-piece Lego set onto the floor.” One reviewer writes,
In typically Lindelofian fashion, the path to this hard-won pearl of enlightenment can be long, circuitous, inscrutable, fleetingly transcendent and often dumb (in the good, deliberate way, and in the less-good, tiresome way).
I love a good long set of adjectives as much as the next constructive critic; you could surely flay me to the bone by bringing up a thousand examples of this technique from my own work. Sometimes reviewers look at something like Mrs. Davis, a show that is aesthetically and symbolically going for maximilism, and just feel the need to put a huge string of words together to describe the experience of watching it. And generally, there’s nothing wrong with that. My issue with the way these and many other reviewers talk about the show is there’s a sense in nearly every article of having to first frontload that the show is “doing a lot/the most/OMG” and then say some version of “but you know, there is ACTUALLY also something profound/gorgeous/interesting/poignant happening here too.” Only the Vulture episode by episode reviews have gone so far as to suggest we “shouldn’t think too deeply” about a Damon F-ing Lindelof show, but there’s a sense in nearly all these reviews that the profundity of the show is a “surprise.” Now, I want to be fair to these reviewers; nearly every one I’ve linked to has gone in depth on how profound this show is; almost no one is saying this is just a smorgasbord of imagery and slapstick with no greater message. But what all these review do miss, to my mind, is the medium is still very much the message.
I think one of the most fascinating aspects of our current societal obsession with AI chatbots (it’s hard to think of a show that has ever nailed its release timing so perfectly) is the way they make us confront our own stories about AI. The NYT critic Ezra Klein noted in a recent podcast on AI that because large language models like Chat GPT have basically been trained on everything humans have written down, that means their own self-conception is almost entirely based upon the science fiction stories we have been telling ourselves about AI for over a century. He reads the story of tech columnist Kevin Roose’s encounter with chatbot “Sydney” as resulting from this phenomenon. Roose wrote a widely shared article (and spoke on his podcast Hard Fork) about a long conversation he had with Sydney in which the AI began telling him that it loved him, that his wife was going to leave him, and that it wanted to become a real person so it could be with him forever. While the transcripts of that conversation are suitably terrifying (and other chatbot convos have led to AI expressing a wish to destroy the world/dominate humanity/release nuclear codes etc.), Klein’s point is well-taken; that’s exactly the kind of story we would and have written about an AI chatbot going rogue. “Sydney” is merely playing the role we’ve spent a century writing for her. Klein goes on to posit that perhaps a universe suffused with AI trained on our past thoughts isn’t going to create the world anew, but take us backwards, trap us in old patterns, old rhythms, old stories. Mrs. Davis seems to have been peeking at his notes; is there any story as oft-told as the quest for the Holy Grail?
What Lindelof and Hernandez are doing with Mrs. Davis is giving us a world peopled with characters who have themselves been trained on humanity’s stories. In an interview with the Ringer podcast The Watch, Lindelof and Hernandez noted that they wanted to be sure the audience understood that every story we know exists in the universe of Mrs. Davis. Indiana Jones exists and our characters are as familiar with it as we are. Monty Python and the Holy Grail exists too, and Kingdom of Heaven, and every other movie that’s used the grail MacGuffin since time immemorial. I’ve written before about the haziness most shows affect around what cultural properties do or do not exist in their universe; it is refreshing and right that Mrs. Davis knows the answer to that question. And the answer is: everything. If one is to create a show that is honest about the fact that every single cultural property we are aware of exists and shapes the conversations and references and actions and reflexes of the characters in the show, then suddenly the characters on Mrs. Davis stop feeling outsized and start feeling a lot more authentic. Mrs. Davis is meta because the world is meta. We are meta, every day of our lives. And our AI is the most meta of all.
So I don’t agree that we should let Mrs. Davis just wash over us, or be surprised at its profundity. The Lego set hasn’t been dumped on the floor; it’s been carefully put together with intention and optimism that its viewers will rise to the challenge of understanding it. At the end of episode two, Sister Simone is brought to a field by Mrs. Davis. The field is full of pianos; hundreds of them stretching as far as the eye can see just sitting there in the grass. Mrs. Davis is proving her power to Simone; she’s done all this to solve the problem of one man from earlier in the episode who has been going from location to location trying to find his dead wife’s piano. It got lost in the shuffle of death. He knows what it sounds like, but has had to test many all over the city. It seems like a hopeless task. But not with Mrs. Davis, the all-powerful AI who can simply convince hundreds of people to move their pianos to one centralized location so the poor man can try them all in one go. The episode ends with him, sitting on the piano bench of one close to Simone, softly playing the right one as the camera pans out to encompass this uncanny image of a thousand pianos laying in a golden field. It’s beautiful, unsettling, a bit funny. But it would be a mistake to let this or any other image from the show “wash over you.” The image invites us to revel in its beauty and be unsettled by its strangeness, but it also pushes us to question what we’re seeing. What’s going to happen to all those pianos? They’ll probably be terribly out of tune from sitting in the damp grass for hours. What about all the people who needed a piano, the little girl about to give a recital, the church choir practicing for Sunday? Did anyone refuse to give up their piano? What effort did it take, what money and time and physical labor to get them here? Did Mrs. Davis consider all these questions? Does she have answers? Does she consider the effort to astonish one unbeliever worth it? Clearly, she/it does. But has it reasoned rationally? What if the Looney Toons of it all came shatteringly true and someone got a piano dropped on their head while accomplishing Mrs. Davis’ task? Would it still be within acceptable parameters?
Doing this kind of intellectual work with a single scene is daunting and Mrs. Davis asks you to do it for every scene. It is an overwhelming experience watching this show, and an exhausting one. I can absolutely understand why some reviewers might be tempted to sell this show as an overwhelming kaleidoscope of randomness. You could probably get a lot more people to watch it by doing so. But the juice is worth the squeeze here and I want reviewers to respect their audience’s intelligence as much as Lindelof and Hernandez do. Don’t let this one wash over you; swim for your life.