Stream It Or Skip It: ‘High Desert’ On Apple TV+, Where Patricia Arquette Is A Recovering Addict Who Decides To Become A Private Investigator

Patricia Arquette is no stranger to TV, having starred in Medium, CSI: Cyber and other shows before and after her Oscar-winning performance in 2014’s Boyhood. But in her latest series, she plays one of her most purely off-the-wall characters, either in film or TV.

HIGH DESERT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: 2013. In a big, modern-looking Palm Springs house, Peggy Newman (Patricia Arquette) has greets friends and family in a party around the pool.

The Gist: Peggy is reveling in being the host. Her brother Stewart (Keir O’Donnell) and sister Dianne (Christine Taylor) are there with her kids, as is her mother Rosalyn (Bernadette Peters). She tells her husband Denny (Matt Dillon) to not talk business. Then the DEA comes calling, basing in the door, then the window as Denny and Peggy try to cram the drugs down the sink and hide the money in the pool filter. “Happy fucking Thanksgiving, by the way,” a chagrined Stewart says to an equally angry Dianne as the chaos reigns.

Ten years later, Peggy is living working in a Wild West theme park in Yucca Valley, CA. She’s been living with Rosalyn, who just passed away. Denny is in prison after that bust a decade earlier. Stewart and Dianne visit her as honored guests at the saloon show where she ziplines over the crowd during a staged bar fight. Peggy thinks they’re there to see how well she’s doing since she’s gotten clean. But they’re there to tell her that they have to sell their mother’s house.

Peggy has certainly been adrift since her mother died; she comes close to getting the number of a drug dealer that’s hanging outside her methadone clinic. She goes to a bar to help her friend Carol (Weruche Opia), who thinks she’s being followed by a fed, who turns out to be a dude with a vegan yogurt frequent buyer card. While catching up with Carol, Peggy sees an ad for a private investigator named Bruce Harvey (Brad Garrett); it’s the same PI that took money from one of her coworkers and didn’t do what he promised. She decides to go over there and get some restitution.

What she finds is a guy whose business is in the tank and is selling things on eBay to barely hang on. She says she can help him; the first thing she does is shoo off his landlord, who’s looking for back rent. With the idea that she’s now a PI, or at least a PI in training, she can tell her brother and sister that she has a steady thing that will keep them from selling the house.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? High Desert sort of givers of My Name Is Earl vibes, though with more of a California backdrop. There’s also a whiff of Poker Face here, in that the protagonists of both shows are unlikely crimesolvers.

Our Take: After the first episode of High Desert, we’re firmly on the fence. The show is billed as a comedy, and its creators, Nancy Fichman, Katie Ford and Jennifer Hoppe-House, all have comedy in their extensive resumes (Arquette and Ben Stiller are among the executive producers, Jay Roach directs all the episodes). The first episode had some funny moments. But, despite Arquette’s prolific skills, we’re just not sure Peggy is the kind of character that we want at the center of a show like this.

To be honest, outside of Garrett, we don’t think of most of this cast in any kind of comedic context (Dillon and Peters, absolutely, but they’re playing recurring characters). Rupert Friend, for instance, who plays a former news anchor now called “Guru Bob,” the husband of one of Peggy’s theme park coworkers who suddenly goes missing, usually has the words “dark” and “brooding” in the descriptions of his roles.

Even Arquette, an Oscar winner who knows how to play a light moment, has never inhabited a character as purely off-the-wall as Peggy before, and it shows at times. When Peggy is suffering through some dark moments, we see where Arquette’s skills can really bring her down to something relatable. But it’s during Peggy’s more unrealistically optimistic moments where Arquette’s performance floats into the ether and makes Peggy look like a cartoon floating in a world of real people.

But by the end of the first episode, we are in Peggy’s corner, despite the fact that we can see the perspective of, for instance, her straightlaced siblings Stewart and Dianne, who are thoroughly sick of their sister’s pity party. We want to see her become an accidentally great PI, especially when she faces doubts from her new boss Bruce and, well, everyone else in her life. Even though Peggy comes off as a big ol’ pain in the ass who has reached her 50s without figuring out how to fend for herself, there’s still something redeemable about her that we root for. That’s definitely attributable to Arquette’s performance.

This is why we’re on the fence. At times, High Desert comes off as an overflowing sack of chaotic scenes passing for a story, but at other times, when it’s focused on where it’s going, it can be fun to watch. When you do surround Arquette with the likes of Garrett, Friend, Opia, Peters, Dillon, etc., you’re going to get some pretty good performances, even among some chaotic scenes. We’re just hoping that as the show’s creators hone in on what makes Peggy a watchable character, Arquette does, as well.

Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode.

Parting Shot: As Peggy is on the phone, finding out that the safe at the theme park was robbed and she’s being suspected for it, she sees that Denny put a fake signature on the divorce papers she served him. She screams “FUUUUCK!” and peels out, the bench she was going to install as a tribute to her mother falling off the roof of her car.

Sleeper Star: Of course, we want to see as much of Matt Dillon and Bernadette Peters as we possibly can, even if they won’t be in every episode.

Most Pilot-y Line: When Bruce tells Peggy she needs to go to PI school, she responds, “Come on, school’s a racket! They spit you out financially illiterate, and honestly, with no real sex education. I learned more at home.” What does that have to do with PI school?

Our Call: STREAM IT, if only because Arquette did enough with Peggy that we wanted to see more by the end of the first episode of High Desert. But we’re still not sure if the show is still going to go off the rails.

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.