‘Solos’: A Corny, Pandemic-Influenced Melodrama That Feels Like Tone-Deaf Celebrities Singing “Imagine” [Review]

Producer/creator David Weil (the writer behind the controversial “Hunters”) returns to Amazon Prime with this week’s “Solos,” a pandemic production filmed in late 2020 that wastes so much talent that it can be almost hard to comprehend how this many award winners fell victim to its thin ideas and manipulative melodrama. They must have been sick. At the beginning of the pandemic, a clip of celebrities singing “Imagine” was widely criticized for feeling like a tone-deaf representation of where the world was at the time. “Solos” is the episodic series version of that clip. In fact, it might produce even more cringing.

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Morgan Freeman opens each episode of “Solos” with simplistic queries like “How far would you travel to find yourself again?” and “Do you wish you could take back the worst day of your life?” just to make sure your eyes are rolling before they even start. Seven largely one-person stories then unfold that feel inspired by recent anthology series like “Black Mirror,” “Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams” or Jordan Peele’s “The Twilight Zone” reboot but inspired by COVID-19, and typically featuring only one actor—sometimes playing multiple roles, sometimes speaking to electronics voiced by another actor, before actual co-stars appear physically in the final two episodes. None of these characters or their stories are connected.

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Every episode of “Solos” feels like it emerged from the pandemic of 2020. They deal with themes of isolation, disconnection, paranoia, and loss, but they do so with the bluntness of a 5th grade creative writing class, using the issues that swirled through society over the last year with all the nuance and grace of a TikTok video. It becomes downright painful to watch such talented actors succumb, to varying degrees, to the weak writing and shapeless direction of most of these half-hour character studies. Only a couple of the episodes feel creatively inspired in any way, and the first two are so manipulative and insulting that most binge viewers won’t get to the ones that could politely be called decent.

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Take the premiere, which stars Anne Hathaway, Anne Hathaway, and Anne Hathaway. The divisive Oscar winner plays a woman trying to crack communicating with her future self in an episode directed by Zach Braff and written by Weil. The first half of the premiere crams in so many bizarre pop culture references—the Verizon/Sprint guy (it should be illegal to even jokingly say “Can you hear me now?” in 2021), “Game of Thrones,” Kelly Clarkson, “13 Going on 30” (?!?!)—that it almost feels like a challenge that Weil was trying to meet to somehow date in the past a story set in the future. As Hathaway’s character attempts to reach her future self, it’s revealed that she’s spurred on to change the future (or the past) because her mother has been diagnosed with ALS, which takes the thin writing to another level of melodramatic manipulation that’s really unforgivable, especially as Hathaway plays to the cheap seats emotionally.

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The stew of half-baked sci-fi mixed with unearned emotion continues into the second half-hour, starring Anthony Mackie and Anthony Mackie as a dying man talking about what really matters to him to his clone, which is about to take his place. Mackie is vulnerable in ways that Sam Wilson isn’t often allowed to be. Still, the writing is almost even thinner regarding how it fails to really capture a father illuminating what matters to him for his future self. In the third episode, Helen Mirren appears as a woman who appears to be headed off into space on her own and is spending time discussing the life she didn’t lead with her on-board computer—imagine watching someone recollect fond memories with their Alexa for half an hour, and that’s close. Mirren really tries to imbue this episode with some grace, as she so often does, but she can’t hold it together.

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Things pick up a bit with the Uzo Aduba chapter about a woman whose home A.I. assistant is trying to force her to go outside again after years in quarantine, and she doesn’t trust her Home HAL to tell her the truth. An admittedly clever idea, this one has the most unexpected relevance given where we are in May 2021 but is similarly overwritten to the other episodes. None of the writing on “Solos” ever builds—it just drops ideas, jokes, and emotions on the floor. Constance Wu pops up as a woman whose memories seem to be fractured in a throwaway episode. Then Nicole Beharie easily carries the best episode, largely because it’s the only one with a visual language at all. She plays a very pregnant woman isolated in a cabin on a snowy night who is going into labor way too early, and the show finally employs interesting craft choices, including canted angles and woozy cinematography that recall a horror movie. Beharie is allowed to do some physical acting—the show mostly falls prey to the idea that “limited cast” means “seated monologues”—but this one gets silly too and injects unearned commentary. And then Freeman appears in the flesh with Dan Stevens in the finale of the 7-episode season, as “Solos” finally presents a duo.

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It’s clearly a lot of on-screen talent, people deft at their craft who were looking for ways to hone it in late 2020 when many productions were still shut down or at least delayed. The call to do a couple of days of focused work on a show that spoke to fears and concerns of life in late 2020 through visions of the future must have been too interesting to ignore. But every idea here feels superficially confronted. Nothing feels like insight, only constant melodrama that barely connects to modern or future concerns. Other than the occasional acting choice (by Beharie or Aduba, particularly), everything here is predictable, bland, and unrealistic. And so “Solos” verges from just misguided into insulting, pushing buttons in the most uninteresting way to get a response—it takes a special kind of nerve to use dying parents to provoke an emotional response in the first two episodes of an anthology series. It will make Amazon Prime subscribers wish they had spent the night alone instead. [D]