Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Gold Digger’ On Acorn TV, Where Julia Ormond Dates A Much-Younger Guy, And Her Kids Don’t Trust Him

The title of the new Acorn TV series Gold Digger doesn’t leave much to the imagination. Mature woman meets younger man, they fall for each other, and the older woman’s adult kids immediately distrust the man’s motives. Can Julia Ormond and writer Marnie Dickens elevate this genre past what we saw in Dirty John two years ago?

GOLD DIGGER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: We see the cliffs and seashore of Devon, England. A woman’s voice says, “Daughter… Wife… Mother. These are my roles. I chose them. For better, for worse. And then you came along, exploded all of that.” We see a stately house, with a woman in a wedding dress looking out the window. She suddenly zips a bag, tosses off her engagement ring, bolts out and gets in her car, her dress hanging out of the bottom of the door as she shuts it and zooms off.

The Gist: A year earlier, Julia Day (Julia Ormond) wakes up on her 60th birthday feeling about as low as she’s felt in ages. She’s about to get divorced from her husband Ted (Alex Jennings), who cheated on her with her best friend Marsha (Nikki Amuka-Bird), and her 24-year-old son Leo (Archie Renaux) live with her in her sprawling Devon home, trying to “find himself.”

On the train to London, she finds out that her daughter Della (Jemima Rooper) won’t be joining her. We then cut to a man who is entering a sleek office building, calling his father to ask if he knows that it’s his mother’s birthday. “She was my wife before she was your mother,” he says dryly. Patrick (Sebastian Armesto) asks his assistant Emily (Maeve Dermody) to help pick out “special” flowers for Julia, because “she’s on her own now.” But when she gets the flowers and calls Patrick, he tells her that he’s stuck at work and will make it up to her.

Without anything else to do, she goes to the British Museum, where she used to work as a conservation expert. As she’s gazing at a missing object, a younger man strikes up a conversation, and to her shock, asks her out for a drink. At first she just knows him as Benjamin (Ben Barnes), but they hit it off on that first date, telling each other dark secrets as well as having fun together. They sleep together that first night, but Julia is shocked again when Ben wants to stick around.

We see a montage of the fun they have together over the next few days. In one scene, he goes to put back an expensive watch he likes and she offers to pay for it. As much as she’d like to stay, though, she goes back to Devon to have lunch with her mother-in-law Hazel (Julia McKenzie), who seems to be taking her side against her son in the divorce. She also runs into Ted, which annoys her, but she confidently says, “I’ve got someone waiting for me.” She also runs into Marsha, who tries to patch things up, but just leads Julia to speed away in tears.

She returns to London and continues to date and sleep with Benjamin, but wonders why he wants to be with an older woman. She doesn’t even know his last name. He tells her his last name is Greene, and that Julia was the first person to make him forget about a previous serious relationship that ended badly. But, in an effort to get back to “real life,” she tells Benjamin that she wants to introduce him to her kids.

At a belated birthday dinner, on the same day her divorce is finalized, she does just that; Patrick mistakes him for a waiter, that’s how shocked they are to see their mother dating someone over 20 years younger than she is, someone she barely knows. When Julia and Della go to the ladies’ room, Patrick and Leo angrily question just why Benjamin is in their mother’s life. Patrick thinks he’s a con man; when Benjamin says, “I’m not going to hurt her,” Leo says he’ll kill Benjamin if he does.

Julia’s kids hang out in a pub after dinner to commiserate, with Della the only one who thinks that Benjamin is making their mother happy for the first time in years. Leo calls him a gold digger, considering the assets Julia is getting in the divorce. Patrick gets drunk and, knowing that there has been tension and a lack of sex with his wife Elmear (Yasmine Akram), stumbles back to his office and makes a pass at Emily, who definitely doesn’t reject his advances. But he pulls back saying, “I’m a good man. I have to be a good man.”

One year later, we flash to the day before the wedding. It seems that Patrick and Elmear have patched up their differences, but Leo and Patrick are even more distrustful of Benjamin. At the rehearsal dinner, Julia says to Patrick, “I’ll say this one last time: Don’t make me choose.” On the day of the wedding, though, he gets an indication that his efforts to discredit Benjamin might blow up in his face.

Our Take: Gold Digger, written by Marnie Dickens (Thirteen), tries to play both sides of a well-worn story, where a man comes into a vulnerable woman’s life, and that woman’s adult kids immediately questions that man’s motives. It’s essentially Dirty John, except for the twist where the man is 20 years younger than the woman. The problem is, that twist doesn’t really sustain a story that feels like we know already.

That could be the reason why the first episode was so sluggish. We get the requisite meet-cute and the montage of the two of them having their whirlwind romance. But when Benjamin stays after Julia, her self-esteem still pretty low, asks him to leave, that’s when it feels like the show takes some less-than-believable reaches in order to get the action rolling.

We can feel that the romance between the two is fueled on Julia’s end by this seemingly worldly young man giving her attention, but we’re still not sure what’s fueling it on Benjamin’s end. Attraction, sure. But considering we know as little about him as Julia does, we raised our eyebrows a bit when she decided to introduce him to her adult children, despite only knowing each other for a few days. Is she just that vulnerable? Patrick describes her as “weak,” but we’re not sure about that. A normal-length romance wouldn’t serve the plot as well, so we get this weird and creepy meeting to just kick off the kids’ mistrust of Benjamin.

Mainly, though, it just feels rote. We know that along the way, Patrick is going to find out more about Benjamin, stuff that’s going to make him warn his mother multiple times. We know Ted and Marsha will be involved, and we’ll get flashbacks to all of their pasts as friends. We see Patrick have flashbacks, too, to a time when they were kids seeing something involving their parents that was traumatic. All of that will make what seems like a pretty well-tread story more interesting. But the cat and mouse between Patrick and Benjamin feels like it’s going to be the least interesting part of this miniseries.

That being said, Ormond puts in a fine performance, showing a woman who is reaching a milestone at the lowest point in her life, and the difference in her before and after meeting Benjamin is stark. Barnes is understatedly weird, not playing an obvious creep but not quite believable as someone who has pure motives, either. And Armesto is especially good at showing the roiling emotions just under Patrick’s stoic surface, emotions that may get the better of him at the end of this series.

Sex and Skin: We see Benjamin and Julia having sex in the shower, at least from Benjamin’s bare-butted perspective. We also see Patrick’s bare tush as he takes a shower to sober up. Elmear tries to have sex with her husband but he prefers e-mailing with work on his phone.

Parting Shot: Patrick sees a note in his favor bag saying “I KNOW YOU’RE HAVING AN AFFAIR PATRICK,” and then Benjamin loudly practices his speech about “What mine is yours and what yours is mine.”

Sleeper Star: Akram has the thankless task of playing Patrick’s long-suffering wife, who’s stuck taking care of their new baby while he works himself to death. She displays a lot more strength in that relationship than Julia ever did in hers, which was likely crumbling for years.

Most Pilot-y Line: We wish we got more information about Leo and Della, but their characters were severely under-written in the first episode.

Our Call: STREAM IT, but only for Ormond’s fine performance and vulnerability. The rest of Gold Digger has yet to show us that it’s going to be anything more than Dirty John for Brits.

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, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.

Stream Gold Digger On Acorn TV