Amateur female detectives are having a streaming TV moment, thanks first to Natasha Lyonne and Rian Johnson’s Poker Face and now courtesy of Patricia Arquette’s High Desert, the loopy story of a woman who seeks redemption—and locates a world of criminal trouble—via a sleuthing career. Buoyed by a wacko, drugged-out, sunburnt, New Age-y energy that faintly recalls The Big Lebowski, Nancy Fichman, Katie Ford and Jennifer Hoppe-House’s Apple TV+ series (premiering May 17) is ramshackle in the right ways, led by Arquette’s tour-de-force of mad, messy, brazen desperation and determination.
Directed by Jay Roach (Austin Powers, Meet the Parents) and executive-produced by Ben Stiller (who’s previously teamed with Arquette on Escape at Dannemora and Severance), High Desert is a comedy whose title is meant to be taken literally. In Yucca Valley, California, felon Peggy (Arquette) is still picking up the pieces of a ten-years-prior calamity in which her family was torn apart—with her husband Denny (Matt Dillon) going to jail—by a DEA drug bust that ruined their narcotics-funded good life. Denny remains in prison and Peggy scrapes by working at local Pioneer Town for Owen (Kevin Can F**k Himself’s Eric Petersen), all while mourning the recent loss of her beloved mother Roslyn (Bernadette Peters) and her continuing estrangement from her son Ethan.
Moreover, she’s at odds with her siblings Dianne (Christine Taylor) and Stewart (Keir O’Donnell), who view her as an unrepentant screw-up and want her to move out of their mom’s house so they can sell it.
Adding to Peggy’s woes, she’s a recovering addict who’s attempting to stick to a methadone treatment course. Her difficulty maintaining her sobriety lends High Desert its trippy verve, with Peggy routinely finding herself incapable of resisting the tabs of acid she has stashed in an old narcotics case. If staying lucid is a challenge, so too is making sure she’s not evicted by her siblings from her home. Fortunately, Peggy has a moment of pure inspiration when she sees a television ad for an investigation business run by Bruce (Brad Garrett) that seems right up her investigative alley.
As luck would have it, she also has a mystery fall in her lap when Owen’s safe is ransacked and—while being suspected of the misdeed—she deduces that the robbery had something to do with her coworker Tammy (a hilarious Susan Park) and the new fake boobs she’s acquired at the exact same moment that she’s broken up with her boyfriend Guru Bob (Rupert Friend).
High Desert begins crazily and then gets even crazier once Peggy inserts herself into Bruce’s struggling business (despite his initial objections) and begins poking around Guru Bob, a former TV news anchor who made an infamous viral-video name for himself when he delivered an on-air rant about how “Everything is stupid!” In the aftermath of that professional implosion, Guru Bob has become a cult-like shaman who’s trading in stolen artwork—although as Peggy soon deduces, his priceless paintings aren’t pilfered but, rather, forgeries.
Not content to keep things simple, Fichman, Ford, and Hoppe-House’s series spins a convoluted web that eventually ensnares Peggy’s best friend Carol (Weruche Opia), who’s dealing with a delinquent teen stepdaughter (Jayden Gomez), as well as Arman (Carlo Rota), a crook who’s not very happy about being swindled by Guru Bob, and sets his imposing, nipple-slicing daughter Heather (Julia Rickert) on him.
Amazingly, this isn’t all the series has to offer, since its main narrative throughline involves Peggy trying to establish her PI bona fides—and earn enough money to keep her mom’s ranch house—by collecting a reward for information regarding the whereabouts of Guru Bob’s MIA wife Dona (Tonya Glanz), who happens to be a member of a New York mob family with roots in Yucca Valley.
High Desert is a madcap morass of alternate identities, stolen goods, and hallucinogenic visions, with Peggy sporadically beset by acid flashbacks to her time with her mom, here played by Peters with a striking panache that helps sell the larger-than-life place she occupies in her daughter’s head and heart. Peters additionally appears in a secondary role as a Roslyn look-alike who’s actually a TV actress (it’s complicated!). However, in one of the show’s few missteps, she’s still somewhat underutilized; a bit more of Peters’ presence would have further enlivened the proceedings.
Fortunately, Fichman, Ford, and Hoppe-House’s adept stewardship turns High Desert into a mix of bright, sunshiny neo-noir and cartoonishly dissolute ridiculousness. Arquette is in the center of the show’s maelstrom throughout, embodying Peggy as a fount of healthy-living and conspiracy-theory kookiness, brash cockiness, and unflagging resolve—not to mention a figure of grief-stricken sadness, which she ameliorates with illicit substances and unwise dalliances with her ex Denny, who before long winds upon her doorstep.
Arquette’s Peggy is both a fully realized three-dimensional protagonist and a uniquely absurd creation, and the actress’ performance is so specific and assured that it serves as the amusing axis around which the rest of the lunacy pivots.
Everyone else in High Desert is equally funny, including Garrett as a miserable detective forced to hitch his fortunes to his off-her-rocker new employee, Dillon as an inveterate hood who shares a deep, spacey connection to Peggy, and Friend as a fraud (or is he?) peddling self-help in a teepee and with more than a few tabs of LSD. Better yet, the series’ zaniness rarely feels forced; it zags and zags with careening liveliness, all without losing sight of the emotional traumas compelling its heroine on her perilous mission.
There are times when the plot gets a tad too convoluted and scattershot, yet even then, that feels in tune with Peggy’s headspace, clouded as it is by drugs, sorrow, regret, and a frantic desire to prove that she’s more than just a disaster with a one-way ticket to loneliness and ruin.
Over the course of its eight half-hour installments, High Desert carves out its own distinctively scraggly, arid crime niche, as well as confirms that no one is presently doing better (and more varied) work on television than Arquette. Peggy’s mind may occasionally be cloudy, but thanks to its sterling star, Apple TV+’s latest is a clear-sighted comic success.
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