In new Apple TV+ limited series The Last Thing He Told Me, a woman realizes she knows less about her husband than she thought after he goes missing. Together with her angry stepdaughter, she must figure out what went wrong — and what her husband actually did for a living.
Based on the bestselling book of the same name by Laura Daves, and starring Jennifer Garner (Alias, Dallas Buyers Club), the show certainly isn’t a failure. However, slack elements in the first two episodes, which premiered today on Apple’s streaming service, keep the mystery from realizing its potential.
The Last Thing He Told Me recap: Season one opener
Season 1, episodes 1 and 2: When we meet Hannah Hall (played by Garner) she’s destroying her cellphone, which pointedly displays a picture of her husband, Owen (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), and desperately looking for her stepdaughter, Bailey (Angourie Rice), in a hotel. How did this happen? Why is Hannah so nervous? Well, let’s rewind to four days earlier.
Owen was congratulating Hannah on a big feature interview article touting her work as an artist. He wants to drive up to Sonoma, California, to celebrate this Saturday (they live in sunny Sausalito). Hannah’s a little nervous about including Bailey on the trip. They don’t get along. When we finally meet Bailey, she’s angst itself. Unhappy that the woman in her dad’s bed isn’t her birth mom, she’s got a big singing recital coming up, and she’s going through all the usual teenage emotions. Hannah wants to bridge the gap between them and is having no luck.
Then the weirdness begins. A random high-schooler shows up at Hannah’s doorstep with a note she says is from Owen. It’s in his handwriting, and it just says two words: “Protect her.” Hannah isn’t more than a little alarmed until dinner rolls around and Owen hasn’t come home or answered his phone. Bailey isn’t concerned, but Hannah’s starting to sweat. She heads to where Owen works, a shady office building called The Shop, and arrives just in time to see his boss, Avett Thompson (Todd Stashwick), being led away in handcuffs. Owen’s car is gone.
Husband, lost; money, found
Fully in a panic now, Hannah heads to Bailey’s school to make sure she’s safe. Together, they make a discovery: Owen left Bailey a note, too. And while it’s a little longer, it’s just as vague. He left something else as well: a bag full of money.
Hannah’s journalist friend Jules (Aisha Tyler) comes by to deliver some exposition: The Shop was a software company that was falsely inflating its value to dupe shareholders. (Enron is invoked twice in 10 minutes.) Not even Bailey’s high school boyfriend, Bobby (John Harlan Kim, who looks every day of his 30 years of age), believes Owen is innocent.
When Jules leaves, Hannah notices the men standing outside her apartment watching her and Bailey. A U.S. Marshall named Grady (Augusto Aguilera) shows up the next day hoping to talk, but Hannah’s not in the mood. He does offer a cryptic warning, however. “Owen Michaels … he’s not who you think he is,” he says.
The beauty of California, without the hectic pace
Photo: Apple TV+
I have not read Laura Daves’ novel The Last Thing He Told Me, but we must presume that seeing the author’s name as creator and producer on the Apple TV+ show means it more or less represents how she imagined the book coming to life onscreen.
Her co-creator, Josh Singer, has a resume of newspaper/journalism movies (Spotlight, The Post, The Fifth Estate), so it’s a little surprising that Last Thing doesn’t have more of a pure factual underpinning. However, it is about gathering facts and clues, so it does make sense that he’s here. He got his start as a writer on The West Wing, and while this doesn’t sparkle like the best of that show, the new Apple TV+ drama definitely aims for that mix of deadpan normalcy interrupted by world-shaking events.
The trouble is, The Last Thing He Told Me seems in no particular hurry to treat Owen’s secret life as an urgency instead of just a slowly dawning inconvenience. Indeed, the show frequently seems more interested in the gorgeous vistas of the California countryside, and the handsomely decorated apartments and coffee shops where each scene transpires, than in Hannah’s journey.
Where’s the sense of urgency?
There isn’t enough urgency in the edits, the images or Jennifer Garner’s performance. I haven’t seen Garner in a dramatic role since 2018’s Love, Simon, in which she’s perfectly respectable. But mostly I remember her from that few-year period where you could not turn on a TV without seeing her hawk credit cards and hair care. It becomes slightly difficult to take her seriously as a brooding, lost woman after seeing her every day as a bubbly Capital One spokesperson.
The overall impression of The Last Thing He Told Me seems to be sort of a gender-swapped Gone Girl, with memories acting as a guide to the search for a missing spouse. Of course, this is television, so it exhibits nothing of Gone Girl’s pacing, violence, biting wit or innovation. It just needs a little more grit, a little more verve, if it’s going to become worthy of seven episodes of investment.
★★★☆☆
Watch The Last Thing He Told Me on Apple TV+
The first two episodes of The Last Thing He Told Me premiered April 14 on Friday on Apple TV+.
Rated: TV-MA
Watch on: Apple TV+
Scout Tafoya is a film and TV critic, director and creator of the long-running video essay series The Unloved for RogerEbert.com. He has written for The Village Voice, Film Comment, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Nylon Magazine. He is the author of Cinemaphagy: On the Psychedelic Classical Form of Tobe Hooper and But God Made Him A Poet: Watching John Ford in the 21st Century, the director of 25 feature films, and the director and editor of more than 400 video essays, which can be found at Patreon.com/honorszombie.
