‘Fatal Attraction’ Episode 1 Recap: Business with Pleasure

When I sat down to write this review of the series premiere of Fatal Attraction, I almost didn’t actually sit down to write this review. Rather, I instinctively reached out to click on the Paramount+ screener app to watch the second episode. I quickly realized what was going on, stopped myself, and got back to work — deadlines and all that — but that instinct struck me pretty hard. I didn’t want to write about Fatal Attraction. I wanted to watch more of it instead, and as soon as possible.

Adapted from James Dearden’s screenplay for the hit 1987 erotic thriller — the granddaddy of them all, really — by Alexandra Cunningham and Dearden himself, Fatal Attraction sets itself apart from the source material immediately. The film, directed by Adrian Lyne, ended with attorney Dan Gallagher and his wife Beth successfully ending the threat posed by Alex Forrest, the deranged woman who began stalking them after an impulsive weekend fling with Dan, presumably to live happily ever after. The premiere, directed by Silver Tree, opens with Dan as a prisoner, convicted of Alex’s murder.

It’s years after the fact now, and Dan is up for parole, a fact about which his young-adult daughter Ellen (Alyssa Jirrils) feels conflicted. This is understandable, given her father’s heartfelt admission of guilt at the hearing, which she attended at his request, but without actually telling him she’d be there. Only when he moves to a halfway house and has the freedom to meet her at a coffee shop (he had no idea she’d come to the hearing and hadn’t seen her in years, per his own wishes) does he tell her the truth: He’s innocent, and he intends to prove it. Presumably, the evidence will be provided by the material set in the not-too-distant past, which in this episode shows us the roots of the affair that will upend his life, and end Alex’s.

Dan is (or was) a Los Angeles deputy district attorney on the come-up. Well-liked by people throughout the court system — he’s got a joke for everyone and everyone’s got a joke for him, a real hail-fellow-well-met type — he’s got a judgeship in his immediate future, or so he thinks. Just on the cusp of turning 40, he’d make it to the bench before his father, a figure who clearly looms large in his legend, managed to do. With his supportive, funny, attractive wife Beth (Amanda Peet) behind him and an adorable daughter (played as a kid by Vivien Lyra Blair, Obi-Wan Kenobi’s young Princess Leia if you couldn’t put your finger on it) by their side, he’s the proverbial man who has everything.

Well, almost. Beth’s wealthy asshole father Warren (John Getz) dismisses Dan’s whole prosecutorial career as a vanity project, a way to feel important rather than putting his law school degree to good use in the private sector and making money for his family. “A cool guy’s cops-and-robbers game,” he calls it. “But still, people will have to call you ‘Judge.’ I’m sure you’ll hate that.” Dan takes offense, though given his cocksure attitude, I think dear old dad might have his number here. 

And Dan doesn’t get that judgeship after all, owing to influence peddling rather than a failure on the merits. (Never mind that Dan probably owes his own success to nepotism in some way.) Infuriated, and over the advice of his buddy Mike (the great Toby Huss), a genial investigator for the DA’s office, he attends a colleague’s retirement party, gets hammered, and crashes a company car on his way home. Mike gets him out of the jam with ease; even at its worst, Dan’s life is still more or less on cruise control.

But there’s another thing that happens at that party: He spends some time with Alex Forrest (Lizzy Caplan), a new face in the Victims Services department at the courthouse with whom he worked on a case. Earlier that day she’d flashed him a wink, to his apparent bafflement. But he’s not completely clueless, and their banter about the cookies on offer at the buffet table is simultaneously casually friendly and ever so slightly sensual. (“Maybe I like having desserts described to me.”)

What happens to them in the elevator at the courthouse after the party is unmistakably so. In a very hey-I’m-just-making-conversation kind of way, Alex casually wonders what would happen if they set off the emergency button and ground the elevator to a halt. After a little back and forth about the various procedures in place, Alex notes that everyone whose job it is to rescue stranded passengers is at the party. 

“What would happen then?” she asks, eyes bright, voice rich. “Just nothing, or something? Would anybody come?” You bet your judgeship that last bit is a double entendre.

Unfortunately the pair are interrupted on the next floor, and the moment passes. But Alex figures out a way to recreate it by frequenting the restaurant where the party was held, which Dan had told her was a very common hangout of his. Another conversation rich with implication occurs, this one about the potential of a missing-but-presumed-dead wife to interrupt the murder case against her husband. 

“Does some part of you think the wife is gonna walk in?” Alex asks oh so innocently.

“No,” Dan says, seeming to realize what he’s really saying midway through. “I know she’s not.” He sits down next to her, and the rest is, if not history, a predicate for a murder conviction.

Let’s get it out of the way quickly: Fatal Attraction is not the kind of show that Alice Birch and Rachel Weisz’s Dead Ringers is. I mean, why would it be? Despite their proximity in the broader erotic-thriller genre, Fatal Attraction is not the kind of movie David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers is either. That said, it’s a much more interesting looking, interesting sounded, interestingly acted and written movie than it needed to be to become a titillating hit; Lyne’s use of silence, shadow, and silhouette in particular is notable without being overtly neo-noirish. Go watch it if you haven’t in a while, it’s worth your time.

I’d say the same about Fatal Attraction the TV show, based on this episode. The simplest way to put it is that if you want to watch telegenic actors like Joshua Jackson, Lizzy Caplan, Toby Huss, and Amanda Peet have a good time talking to each other the way grown-ups actually talk while being crisply filmed and scored, Fatal Attraction is a show for you. 

The adaptation and extrapolation Dearden’s original script by Dearden and Cunnigham (who co-devloped the show with Kevin J. Hynes) treats dialogue as a form of worldbuilding. The characters, Dan in particular, are always “on,” peppering their speech with light sarcasm, comic irony, and wisecracks — the way you yourself might talk at the office, in order to convey bonhomie and keep things light, a way of acknowledging that you share the same pressures even if you share little else. Even the way that pair of Dan’s buddies from the elevator convey their attraction to Alex as she walks away makes sense: Unlike a previous scene in which the casually sexist participants knew she was safely out of earshot and could talk about her explicitly, these guys simply raise their eyebrows and sing “Goodnight Ladies.” It’s very smart writing. (Not always subtle writing — he delivers a summation mocking the idea of the “irresistible impulse,” cross-cut with him sitting down next to Alex — but smart.)

They nail the domestic tone too: the way Beth can ramp up her sex appeal even while performing everyday tasks rings true for those of us who’ve had to squeeze it in (haha) between chores and doctors’ appointments. Her encouragement when Dan comes home drunk and defeated also feels true to life: Her initial anger gives way to commiseration and then anger on his behalf when he tells her he didn’t get the appointment, ending in an offer to sit on the couch and veg out while watching an ice-fishing reality show.

The team also intelligently work around the lack of contemporary salience for the very ‘80s yuppie archetypes played by Michael Douglas, Glenn Close, and Anne Archer in the original by shifting Dan and Alex from the corporate world — albeit the fairly interesting and less overtly predatory subset of publishing and libel law — to that of the criminal justice system. Working with Victims Services makes Alex immediately seem both trusting and trustworthy, while Dan is established as a guy who’s comfortable making life-altering decisions for others while preserving his own placid domesticity. (They do give him Michael Douglas’s slick-back hairstyle, though, which is a hoot.)

It looks and sounds nice, too. I already mentioned the score, which burbles along engagingly courtesy of composer Craig DeLeon.

Most importantly, I buy the chemistry between Alex and Dan. It’s true that Alex comes on weirdly strong with that wink, weirdly enough that it seems, well, weird to Dan at the time. But their subsequent interactions are mutual, and their sudden emotional and almost-but-not-quite physical intimacy flows naturally from the position Dan finds himself in. It’s a short trip from telling a stranger you’re upset when you’ve worked hard to hide it even from your best friends and closest colleagues, to nearly pulling the emergency brake on an elevator so you can make out, especially when booze is involved. Dan’s confidence, his married-and-satisfied attractiveness, complements Alex’s piercing loveliness rather well, in the same way the movie Alex’s severe beauty played against the movie Dan’s handsomest-guy-in-the-office looks. It’s going to be interesting to watch their attraction burst, and I mean that in every sense of the words.  

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.