Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Last Thing He Told Me’ On Apple TV+, Where Jennifer Garner Is A Woman That Bonds With Her Stepdaughter While Looking For Her Missing Husband

We’re fans of Jennifer Garner, full stop. She brings a sunny normalcy to her roles, whether they’re comedies, dramas, or the voice of Mama Llama. Her social media is a normcore delight. But we miss the Garner we were introduced to in Alias over 20 years ago, the one that kicked ass and took very little shit from anyone. A version of that Garner is back in a new Apple TV+ thriller.

THE LAST THING HE TOLD ME: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A woman is running water over her wrists. She looks in the mirror. Her phone vibrates.

The Gist: Hannah Hall (Jennifer Garner) looks at the phone, with a picture of her and her husband Owen Michaels (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) on the screen, and decides to step on it to destroy it. She then looks for her 16-year-old stepdaughter Bailey (Angourie Rice) through the atrium of the hotel where they’re staying. She’s nowhere to be found.

Four days earlier, Owen, an executive at a Silicon Valley startup called The Shop, is watching Hannah, an artist who makes wooden sculptures and bowls, doing her work. They’re a relatively new couple; he wants to celebrate their 14-month anniversary, mainly because he’s just happy he found someone, when he really thought that was impossible.

The next morning, they wake up on the houseboat they live on in an upscale Sausalito residential wharf. While Bailey trusts her father implicitly, things are still rocky with Hannah.

After Hannah drops off some of her work at a local university in the city and runs errands to cook a special dinner for Owen and Hannah, as well as talk to her reporter friend Jules (Aisha Tyler), a teenage girl gives Hanna a note in Owen’s handwriting. All it says is “PROTECT HER.” Between this, the fact that she can’t get Owen on the phone and Jules’ repeated messages something is definitely wrong.

Hannah drives down to The Shop’s offices, just in time to see the FBI going through a raid and the CEO being led away in handcuffs. She then picks up Hannah from her musical rehearsal at her school, and after she makes some plans with her boyfriend Bobby (John Harlan Kim), she goes to her locker to find a duffel bag stuffed in it. It has a note from Owen pinned to it, and it’s stuffed full of cash.

Back on the houseboat, Jules comes by and tells her what she found out: The Shop’s CEO is being accused of fraud, claiming profits even though they haven’t released working software yet. And when Jules called Owen to ask him about the tip she got, he didn’t sound like someone who had no clue about what was happening. This might have prompted him to run.

The next morning, Hannah gets a visit from Grady (Augusto Aguilera), who warns her that Owen isn’t the person she thinks he is.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Last Thing He Told Me has a similar feeling to another recent production from Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine, the Hulu series Little Fires Everywhere.

Our Take: Laura Dave and Josh Singer adapted The Last Thing He Told Me from Dave’s book of the same name, and it’s one of those shows that has us hovering towards the “meh” end of the review spectrum. There was nothing inherently wrong with the first episode, but nothing really drew us in, either.

That just means that it’s the kind of show that probably needs an episode or two to really get going. Yes, the mystery at the center of the show is set up right away, and Dave and Singer don’t keep us completely in the dark: Owen is gone, and it’s related to the indictment of the CEO of his company. What the series is really going to be about is Hannah trying to find out the truth, even if that truth is painful. At the same time, because Bailey and Hannah will be on the run, they’ll likely bond in their shared pursuit of that truth.

The show is definitely helped by Garner’s badassery, at the level we haven’t seen from her since her Alias days. From the first minute she realizes that Owen has disappeared, all she wants is answers. While she can’t believe that her husband could be involved in the company defrauding its investors, she likely has doubts in the farthest reaches of her mind. After all, how well do you really know anyone, especially someone you’ve only known for just over a year?

But those contemplations are going to take a back seat to Hannah and Bailey’s search. That’s where we hope the show sucks us in. As of the end of the first episode, that hasn’t happened yet.

Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode.

Parting Shot: As the marshal walks down the dock after telling Hannah there are things about Owen she doesn’t know about, she stands on the dock with an incredulous look. We then quickly pan away and show an overview of her neighborhood and some other houseboat wharfs on the bay.

Sleeper Star: When you bring Aisha Tyler onto your show, you’re not giving her an ancillary role. Is Jules just there for support or will she digging into The Shop and what Owen may or may not have known about the company’s shenanigans?

Most Pilot-y Line: Was there a reason why Jules was calling Hannah from Oracle Park, home of the San Francisco Giants, other than to say, “Yep, we’re filming this in San Francisco.”? That scene felt like Apple’s billions at work.

Our Call: STREAM IT. We’re recommending The Last Thing He Told Me purely because we want to see Jennifer Garner kick ass and take names for seven episodes. We’re just not sure if the story itself will hold our interest for that entire time.

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, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.