A gory horror series with Billy Crystal and Itzhak Perlman? Who is this for?
‘Before’ is too shallow to be smart and too silly to be scary
Jacobi Jupe and Billy Crystal in Apple TV+’s Before. Courtesy of Apple TV+
By PJ Grisar October 24, 2024
If IMDb is to be believed, the violinist Itzhak Perlman, despite many appearances as himself, has only once played a character on screen.
Unaccountably it is in the new Apple TV+ series Before, where he plays the role of Drake, seemingly a professor of something or other at Columbia who shows up briefly in the pilot to tell a frazzled child psychiatrist played by Billy Crystal that he doesn’t recognize the strange language his 8-year-old patient started speaking in a moment of distress. (He does not, at any point, play violin or even show up in subsequent episodes.)
The reason for Perlman’s presence isn’t so mysterious. He seems to be friends with Crystal (who is also executive producer, along with screenwriter Eric Roth), making a previous cameo as himself in Crystal’s movie Here Today. But bundled together with a cast that includes Crystal and Judith Light and a screening and conversation held recently at the 92nd Street Y, there’s a more cynical explanation: They want Jews who comprise Crystal, Perlman and Light’s demographic to watch this.
By “this,” I mean a series of 30-minute episodes where Crystal stabs his hand and neck with sharp objects, dreams of blood geysering out of his body and carves into a child’s skull with a scalpel to extract an imaginary worm. Somehow I don’t see the target audience.
The plot of Before, created by Sarah Thorp, is as cockeyed as it is familiar. Crystal plays Eli Adler, a widower, firmly in the denial stage of grief. He is often visited by apparitions of his late wife (Light, who appears almost exclusively as a spectral scold). One day, a selectively mute child shows up on the stoop of Eli’s brownstone, fingers bleeding, having carved something cryptic onto his door. The boy, Noah (Jacobi Jupe, admittedly excellent), is revealed to be a troubled foster child, and a family lawyer begs Eli to take him on as a patient.
Eli is reluctant, but when things get weird — like the aforementioned boy speaking in a foreign language that turns out to be “17th-century Dutch” — he becomes overly invested in finding the root of Noah’s trauma, which, shocker, may be connected to his own. Maybe your sixth sense is tingling about now.
If while watching the oeuvre of Crystal, you ever wished that Harry Burns spent less time running to Sally Albright and more time dashing down hospital corridors, or that his analyst in Analyze This had a pediatric specialty that involved staredowns with dour elementary school kids, Before will deliver. But, if you have some trouble mentally slotting this veteran funny man into a frequently gross psychological horror, your doubts are well-founded.
The supporting cast, which includes Rosie Perez as Noah’s foster mother, does its best with some strange material, but the proceedings all feel fundamentally mismatched, too psychologically shallow for those wanting a cerebral thriller and too fusty for horror fans.
Even in the surprisingly expanding canon of comedic actors playing Jewish shrinks mourning dead wives and hallucinating while facing a problem patient (ahem, The Patient) the show is comparatively half-baked.
Crystal is to be commended for trying something a little different, but there’s no shame in saying the treatment didn’t work this time. Thankfully there is consolation for him. If the show gets overlooked or even panned, he surely has Perlman on speed dial to play the world’s saddest violin.
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