Annaleigh Ashford gives a strong, assured performance starring in this crime series, whose well-directed pilot uses a meta-story structure to add depth to the proceedings.
Ashford works as a makeup artist on a true-crime TV series, so it's not surprising that her job mirrors her own dealing with bad dad Dennis Quaid, locked away in prison, and the memories of crime in her own life. Pilot opens with a concise presentation of her oh-so-normal nuclear family, while her locking daddy's letters away in a safe in her closet is an excellent way to dramatize how she represses her trauma. Us voyeurs out in TV Land will get to see exactly what she's repressing as the series unfolds.
I prefer straight fiction to this currently popular "true-crime" craze, because the notion that what we're witnessing is the truth begs the question: is this autobiographical content, popularized previously in a podcast, actually truthful? With fiction that sort of presumption is not used as a crutch.
For this series, flashbacks of Quaid with his daughter when she was young are presented, but clearly suspect. Do these really reflect what happened? Is the real-life character Ashford portrays a reliable narrator?
As far as dramatization is concerned, the last-minute clue leading to the pilot episode's cliffhanger ending is effective, but is this real?
