Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Blood’ On Acorn TV, Where A Daughter Suspects Her Father Murdered Her Mother

The title of Acorn TV’s latest original series, Blood, has a few different implications. There’s the blood we see after the patriarch of the Hogan family falls down and dies. But there’s also the fact that she’s blood relatives with people who think she’s off her rocker, and she’s blood relatives with the person that may have been gaslighting her for her entire life. Read on for more about this interesting psychological drama…

BLOOD: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A woman angrily driving and talking to her dog walker over the phone. She’s upset about more than the fact that the walker isn’t available. She pulls over and pukes.

The Gist: Cat Hogan (Carolina Main) is driving up from Dublin to her family’s house in West Meath because she got notice that he mother Mary (Ingrid Craigie) died suddenly earlier in the day. There, she greets her brother Michael (Diarmuid Noyes) and sister Fiona (Grainne Keenan). They tell her that their father Jim (Adrian Dunbar) was called out to perform an emergency surgery and when he came back he saw that Mary, who was in declining health and suffering from dementia, had fallen next to the pond and died. She goes upstairs and has a weird, uncomfortable encounter with her father.

As she sleeps that night, we see some fragments of childhood imagery in Cat’s dreams. There are scenes of her yelling, scenes of her dad being angry, and other suspicious snippets. When she wakes up, she goes outside and notices some weird things next to the pond. Her mother’s brooch is lying among the paving stones. There’s a huge blood stain. And one of the frog statues that lined the pond is missing. She goes to her dad’s clinic and finds out that he wasn’t there the previous day.

She suspects that something’s amiss, but her family — especially Fiona — just think she’s spouting the same outrageous lies she did when she was a kid (or so they thought). But that night, during Michael’s gig at a local pub, she follows her dad back to his car and sees a red cardigan in it. She sees the cardigan at church the next day — on her dad’s receptionist Sarah (Shereen Martin), whom she follows home and confronts about having an affair with Jim. One thing: everyone, including Cat’s mother, knew about the affair and encouraged it, given how Mary was fading. Once again, Cat looks like the unhinged black sheep of the family, but she knows that something is up.

Our Take: Blood poses an interesting question, one we haven’t seen on a show in a while: What if the person in the family everyone thought was crazy was right all along? For her entire life, Cat has thought that some of the difficulty she’s had with her father wasn’t quite all in her head, but maybe was remembered wrong, or had a different explanation. But, she’s also not sure that her father hasn’t been gaslighting her all this time, making her feel like she’s crazy when she was right all along.

The first episode smartly sets up this scenario, and the death of Cat’s mother Mary frames this conflict nicely. Her sister Fiona is firmly on her father’s side, Michael is in the middle. She has allies in town like her friend Barry (Cillian O’Gairbhi), whose father died suddenly a number of years prior. But more are in the camp of Dez Breen (Sean Duggan), the cop who found her puking the night of her mother’s death and didn’t report what was likely an illegal Breathalyzer test; he says that there a lot of people in town that would do anything for her father Jim.

What we hope we see from the show in its other five episodes is a push in on the relationship between Cat and Jim, and why she seems to be the only one in the family who doesn’t trust him.

Sex and Skin: Besides seeing Cat sleeping in her underwear on the bathroom floor in one scene, there’s nothing.

Parting Shot: Jim threatens Cat, telling her that she bothers Sarah or undermines him again, she’ll be more or less shunned from the family.

Sleeper Star: He’s the star of the show, but this is still a good place to talk about Adrian Dunbar, who plays Jim as a combination of befuddlement and creepiness all at once. When he’s threatening Cat, he’s downright scary, but when he searches for an alibi when Cat confronts him about not being there for Mary when she fell, he looks like a guy who’s a pretty bad liar — which Cat knows isn’t true.

Most Pilot-y Line: “He’s not a great man, but he’s not a bad man,” says Michael to Cat about Jim. We get the implication, but it’s more of an equivocation than we think was intended.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Fine performances, and the whole idea that one of the children in a family becomes a “black sheep” fully through others’ actions is an interesting premise.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Watch Blood on Acorn TV