Apple TV+’s new series damn near cost me my marriage: Calls reviewed

Calls is the very antithesis of televisual soma. In fact it’s so jarring and discomfiting and horrible that I think this week’s column damn near cost me my marriage. ‘Why are we having to watch this hideous drivel?’ grumbled the Fawn, who felt cheated of a soothing night glued to our new addiction, the French series Call My Agent! (Netflix). ‘Because it’s my job and this is a new thing and Call My Agent! isn’t,’ I said.

So I had to watch on my own. I do understand the Fawn’s objections. Really, it’s more like radio than TV and might work better enlivening a long car journey. There are no attractive images to look at — no actors or scenery or anything like that — just random electronic squiggles and snatches of text, spelling out the muffled, often hard-to-decipher phone conversations being played out before you.

In episode one, a man in LA is talking to his ex-girlfriend in New York when a mysterious creature (not human, she thinks) looms outside her window and, by the time the cops get to her, has all but torn her to shreds.