Clarisse Loughrey’s Show of the Week column, published every Friday, spotlights a new show to watch or skip. This week: Billy Crystal’s a haunted psychiatrist in Before.
Before: Limited Series
Apple TV+’s Before is the psychological thriller miniseries equivalent of that one friend who’s addicted to therapy speak. It’s as insistent that it’s about “generational trauma” as someone who liberally throws around the terms “narcissism” and “toxicity” without any diagnostic basis. Yet, really, all you’re watching is Billy Crystal potter around his apartment, run into the ghost (and/or hallucination) of his dead wife, and then react with a curious mixture of fear and mild annoyance.
After that, he’ll pop into work and talk to a little boy who draws scary pictures, scratches his nails across wooden surfaces, speaks in tongues, and whispers ominous phrases like, “You know what you did.” And that’s all Before really is – ten episodes of 101 pseudo-supernatural foreshadowing, then the big reveal right as your patience grows thin.
Crystal’s character, Eli, is a child psychiatrist, and his patient, Noah (Jacobi Jupe), is a foster kid under the care of a woman named Denise (Rosie Perez). He’s been moved between five families in two years because they won’t stop calling him “unnerving”. Denise and Eli are his last hope. After that, the state hospital beckons. Eli is a man of material reality and logic, who approaches Noah’s unusual symptoms with a diagnostic eye, but discovers that the unmistakeable tether between him, the kid, and his dead wife Lynn (Judith Light) may point to a phenomenon “beyond science”.
Are we talking reincarnation? Schizophrenia? Dissociative amnesia? A mass psychogenic disorder? The answer to these questions is the sole concern of Before, created and written by Sarah Thorp. And, arguably, there’s only so much one man can hallucinate his dead wife before it starts to become routine. “Would you just stop!” he yells at one point, with the genuine irritation of someone who’s just had the sound of gum-chewing pumped down their ear canal for the last ten minutes.
Crystal, then, is a (possibly unintentionally?) brilliant choice of lead here. His performance has no trace of the actor and/or comedian associated with wholesomeness and/or buffoonery who’s now become determined to tackle the tortured, polar opposite and show us their range. Crystal as Eli is very much the Crystal we’re familiar with. He’s not cracking all that many jokes, but he’s frequently curmudgeonly and approaches the psychologically inexplicable exactly as you would expect a curmudgeon would.
And the actor nails the series’ key emotional moments, so it’s still an entirely believable turn. It’s just that, with the dead wife being played by Judith Light, whose hauntings consist of turning up unannounced to give Eli a withering look before retreating back into the shades, Before bears the unmistakable thrill of the camp.
So, I’m not sure if I’d recommend people Before, or warn them against it. It’s repetitive and one-note, but not entirely insulting to its audience. Its “big reveal” isn’t remotely shocking, but neither is it particularly tired or clichéd. In that way, Before is the perfect television series if you’re after something profoundly untaxing, but which you can describe to co-workers the next day with the whiff of prestige by piecing together a few vague assertions about collective psychological distress. You might end up talking nonsense, but someone will find you smart.
