Fans of Big Little Lies, The White Lotus, and other perplexing puzzle shows have a new summer thriller to piece together in Surface. Gugu Mbatha-Raw has lost track of her entire life in the first trailer for the upcoming Apple TV+ series, thanks to one nearly fatal tumble from a boat. Did she actually have the ideal life—or was there a reason she jumped?
“If my life was so perfect, why did I try to end it?” Sophie (Mbatha-Raw) asks herself in the trailer, as everyone else urges her to move on. Seems like everyone’s in on a secret that Sophie just can’t figure out.
Because, on paper, Sophie’s life does look perfect. She’s living in a lovely home in San Francisco–and if you know the Bay Area, you’ll understand those pieces of real estate aren’t cheap!—with her handsome husband (Oliver Jackson-Cohen). Maybe, just maybe, with such a crisp, clean life, she didn’t actually jump from that boat. She was pushed.
The coast guard confirms this (or do they?) by telling Sophie that she not only had insisted that a man pushed her, but also that she stated her name was completely different from what was on her ID. Meanwhile, somewhere in his alibi, her hubby is lying. Maybe everyone’s lying. As Sophie starts recalling the true events leading up to her fall, the people around her continue to shield her from the truth.
If Surface sounds a lot like Big Little Lies—one fate-defining tumble, a luxuriously eerie California setting—that’s because the show has tapped the same executive producers from the Reese Witherspoon-led series. Get ready for more sweeping bridge shots and ridiculously wealthy creeps.
Surface also has I May Destroy You’s Sam Miller at the helm as the director of the show. While Surface will surely track new twists and turns, I May Destroy You similarly tracked a plot about memory loss after Arabella (Michaela Coel) copes with sexual assault.
Not enough TV credits here to impress you? The show’s creator, Veronica West, served as a writer on the prematurely canceled High Fidelity show starring Zoë Kravitz. Any friend of High Fidelity is a friend of mine!
Alongside Gugu Mbatha-Raw, the series cast includes Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Stephan James, Ari Graynor, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, François Arnaud, and Millie Brady. Though she has a stellar supporting cast, from the looks of the trailer, Mbatha-Raw herself is about to give the performance of a lifetime.
Surface debuts on Apple TV+ on July 29.
