by Jake Hjort, Contributing Writer
When you break it down to its components, Apple TV+’s High Desert has everything it takes to be a fun show. There’s plenty of talent on both sides of the camera, with Patricia Arquette, Rupert Friend, and Bernadette Peters in starring roles, and Ben Stiller and Austin Powers director Jay Roach on the creative team. The premise, that of recovering addict, Peggy (Arquette), seeking to find change in her life by becoming a private investigator, is interesting enough, and the setting of the Californian desert provides a lovely backdrop. However, the whole of High Desert fails to be greater than the sum of its parts, and the final product is a sloppy, disorganized mess.
Undeniably, the show centers upon Arquette’s performance. At the beginning, Peggy isn’t far from rock bottom: She’s an addict struggling with recovery, her drug dealing husband (Matt Dillon) is in prison, she’s got a dead-end job at a frontier reenactment tourist trap, and her mother (Peters) has recently passed away. As the show progresses, Peggy begins working for struggling private investigator, Bruce Harvey (Brad Garrett), and becomes entwined in various mysteries and crimes, often centering around former anchorman-turned-mystic and conman, Guru Bob (Friend). Arquette plays the role incredibly inconsistently, sometimes highly capable and competent, and other times so manic she borders on unhinged. While this inconsistency isn’t necessarily incongruous with Peggy’s character, it often feels disorienting, and there are several sequences in which I genuinely could not tell if we were watching reality or some sort of dream or hallucination. The role isn’t necessarily poorly acted, but I can’t say it was a performance that I particularly enjoyed watching. On the flip side, Guru Bob is by far the standout character to me, full of charisma and providing a lot of the laughs in what is otherwise a comedy series in which the humor falls flat.
Structurally, High Desert really struggles to function as a proper mystery show. The writers are clearly more interested in making a comedy than a true detective story, but when you make your protagonist a private investigator, I think it’s important to give them some interesting mysteries to solve. Not only are the mysteries bland, but almost all of them persist throughout the entire season, making the finale little more than a montage of Scooby Doo-esque reveals that largely feel unearned. I think the show would have worked much better if it used a more traditional case-of-the-week structure, putting together pieces of the puzzle as it went, and giving Arquette more investigating to do. Instead, we get several storylines and characters coming in and out and fighting for screen time, making the plot difficult to keep a firm focus on.
It’s hard not to compare High Desert to Poker Face, which streamed on Peacock earlier this year and centers on Natasha Lyonne playing an amateur detective solving crimes in a similar Western setting. Poker Face succeeds in many of the ways in which High Desert does not, with a stronger lead performance, more engaging mysteries, and an overarching structure which is hard to predict but easy to follow. High Desert has a lot of the pieces that a good show needs, but unfortunately the producers failed to put them together in a meaningful way.
Score: 4/10
High Desert is currently streaming on Apple TV+
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