I’m not saying Apple TV+ has a problem with repeating stories, but with the new drama For is the service’s third series in which a well-known comedy actor plays a man grieving for his deceased wife. Not the third series of the streaming platform ever to rely on that gray trope. Not even their third series this year that draws from that specific source.

Foras Billy Crystal follows mourning a deceased husband Disclaimerin which Kevin Kline mourns a deceased husband, and the second season of Shrinkwhile Jason Segel continues to mourn a deceased husband. That’s three shows with this core conceit premiering since… October 11th.

Unfortunately, Big Widower Energy is far from the only way to do that For feels like Apple TV+’s most Apple TV+ show yet. You could show me any gloomy, faded frame For and even without knowing who was in it or what show it was from, I could identify it as an Apple TV+ show, because there is a certain subset of Apple TV+ shows that rely on excessively strict, upside-down programming. -the aesthetics of aquariums as an artificial proxy for earned sobriety.

Very little is earned Forwhich is basically a thin direct-to-video film from the late ’90s stretched into ten suffocating half-hour episodes.

Crystal plays Eli, a child psychologist grieving for his wife Lynn (Judith Light), who died by suicide in the late stages of a battle with cancer. He lives a life haunted by memories of her and refuses to even open the door to the bathroom in which she died.

Eli has largely stopped seeing patients and almost stopped communicating with his daughter Barbara (Maria Dizzia). Then former colleague Gail (Sakina Jaffrey) says she has an interesting patient for him. Then a mysterious eight-year-old boy (Jacobi Jupe’s Noah) creepily appears in Eli’s apartment and the therapist must return the child to exhausted foster mother Denise (Rosie Perez). Then it turns out that the interesting patient Gail had for Eli was… Noah!

Noah has episodes, spells or incidents. He lashes out and stabs classmates and speaks in a strange foreign language, although Denise insists that before these incidents began, he was “the sweetest kid in the whole world.” He doesn’t exactly see dead people, but he experiences things beyond conventional understanding, although it’s not immediately clear whether those things are related to ghosts, demons, trauma, mental illness, or some unknown phenomenon.

Eli thinks there is a rational explanation for Noah’s behavior because he is one of those characters whose idea of ​​chatting with a priest is to declare, “You know what I believe in?” I believe in facts. You believe in fairy tales that are invented to prevent people from facing the truth.”

Oh.

If you’ve ever seen a movie or TV show before, you can probably guess that it doesn’t take long for Eli to begin to realize that his bond with Noah goes far beyond anything that can be “rationally” explained. But at the same time For is also the kind of show that ends with a five-minute monologue that both explains the title of the series and tries, without any success, to suggest that aspects of the plot make sense if you’re open enough to believe in them. In case you haven’t noticed, I wasn’t.

I’m sure it’s possible to be more informed For wavelength than me.

It’s a show that occasionally works on the most rudimentary levels. For a few episodes, I was intrigued by the sound design, which treats every auditory cue as an attack on Eli’s self-imposed isolation, and I appreciated the foreboding environment created before the dull and basic scares begin.

Some of the scares are mildly effective, but not because of anything creator Sarah Thorp or various directors (Adam Bernstein for the pilot, Jet Wilkinson as primary producing director) do. It just so happens that people hallucinating worms under their skin and insects entering orifices where insects don’t belong will always be disturbing, something I know because I’ve seen the worm and insect thing play out in too many horror movies to count.

If that sounds a bit like a supernatural thriller by the numbers, I can assure you For is at least as much creepy kid in numbers as it is child endangerment in numbers, and it works at those rudimentary levels too.

Noah spends the entire series in various dissociative states, experiencing a variety of seizures and incidents related to possession. Your response will be somewhere between “impressed by his effort” and “concerned by the level of simulated trauma he had to experience for a subpar television show.” My ratio was probably around 25/75 between these two extremes, but perhaps you are more generous. Perhaps I would have been more impressed with the youth acting if there had been more evidence that what the show gradually pulls back to reveal was in any way evident in Jupe’s performance.

The things the show eventually reveals are frustrating for a number of reasons, not least because several identical surprises are treated as surprises in multi-episode ending cliffhangers. The show keeps saying the same thing over and over again, increasingly undermining both actual psychiatric diagnoses and supernatural fantasies.

Almost none of it makes sense, but every time a logic error occurs all you have to do is say “dream logic” and move on, which is one of my five least favorite types of stories.

The dialogue is consistently terrible and devoid of human personality or feeling? Dream logic. Do none of the supporting characters or performances bear even the slightest resemblance to real people? Dream logic. Eli hears a child speaking a mysterious foreign language, goes to an academic friend (Itzhak Perlman’s Drake) who gives him access to an online translator, revealing that the language is a not uncommon one that Eli uses to learn a sentence – a sentence completely related to English – and then the language is never relevant again and Perlman’s character is never mentioned again? Dream logic!

That last example is also an opportunity for Eli to use a web browser on a MacBook, which Apple always appreciates. When dream logic and product placement join forces with a grieving widower in a generally colorless world, that’s a sweet spot for Apple TV+.

Completely stripped of all his signature comedic mannerisms, even when sharing scenes with a rambunctious pug who is the show’s most likable character, Crystal is completely convincing as a man who needs more sleep and wishes his bathroom taps were turned on. upstairs to stop dripping.

When I stopped caring about what happened on the show, my main interest became whether the fact that Crystal was generally “fine” was a good thing. For a hint of grounding that it didn’t deserve, or that there was a chance a more comfortable dramatic actor could have taken this meager part and elevated it somehow. The conclusion I came to was that Crystal, if not completely mah-velous, was as good as this show could get. He’s not to blame for the lack of supporting players to make him do the opposite, nor for the chronologically disorienting story that denies him a credible arc. Dream logic!

The most special thing about For – yes, stranger than the tentacle monsters Noah sees or the mumbo-jumbo Thorp who crosses the series for “authenticity” – is how many good actors show up and do nothing.

Robert Townsend, enjoying a career renaissance, plays a friend in a cool hat who disappears from the story after throwing a weird party, the outcome of which is never mentioned again. (Dream logic.) Hope Davis plays a doctor who shows up halfway through the show to disapprove of everything Eli does, presumably because she doesn’t understand dream logic. Jennifer Esposito is a paranormal cleanser in one episode. Don’t ask. Barbara Bain shows up in another episode and, like almost everyone else in the series, provides a piece of mysterious progress data and never returns.

Judith Light is there a lot (I added “Judith” because the phrase is otherwise inaccurate, as the show is compulsively underplayed), and defies death, but she deserves more and better. It reflects the show’s tapestry that Ava Lalezarzadeh is one of the top-billed actors in the cast, playing what my notes call “Unnamed Exposition-Repeating Assistant” (she’s eventually called “Cleo,” but by then it hardly matters more).

As a means for Crystal to prove that he can be humorlessly brooding, For at the very least fulfills a very fundamental mandate. But as a spiritual thriller with supernatural undertones, it’s a lifeless dud that will do little to change the running joke that Apple TV+ is a repository of star-studded limited series you’ve never heard of. Watch Pachinko instead of.