Stream It Or Skip It?

The new Paramount+ thriller Coldwater is strange, but not particularly good. Sometimes strange can make a not-good show worth watching, but most of the time it just makes that not-good show even worse. What’s the case here?

COLDWATER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

Opening Shot: A man running late at night, sobbing. He’s covered in blood.

The Gist:  “LONDON. Two Months Earlier.” John (Andrew Lincoln, most famous from The Walking Dead), a stay-at-home dad, is at the playground with his five-year old son Harry (Dhilan Miller) and nine-year-old daughter Violet (Amara Atwal), not paying a ton of attention as he pushes Harry on a swing while looking at real estate listings on his phone.

Then a bigger kid tries to pull Harry off his swing; the boy’s dad intervenes and hits his son, prompting a mom next to John to protest. As the mom starts getting pummled by the violent dad, John freezes, then runs with Harry in his arms, momentarily forgetting that Violet was with him, too. When another parent asks him why he didn’t intervene, he just fitfully says, “I couldn’t.”

Two months later, the family has moved to a cul-de-sac in Coldwater, Scotland. John’s wife Fiona (Indira Varma), is contracted to write a memoir about her days owning a trendy London restaurant. But for the most part, they’ve moved because John just couldn’t shake how badly he crumbled during the playground incident. Despite Fiona’s desire to reignite their sex life, John doesn’t want any part of it. When he’s confronted by a local thug named Angus (Lorn Macdonald) at a convenience store, he crumbles just like he did in London.

John and his family are invited to the home of their neighbors Rebecca (Eve Myles) and Tommy (Ewen Bremner). Rebecca is a local vicar, but it seems that Tommy is the more religious of the two, and when John meets him, he’s conducting a bible study group that somehow gets on the subject of serial killers. And while Fiona was creeped out by Tommy, John felt comfort in Tommy’s reassurance, and praying with Tommy truly moved him, even though he generally doesn’t believe in God.

Still, John’s PTSD is still keeping him awake, especially after he hears a thunk in the house and thinks it’s an intruder; it turns out to be Harry. To work off his anxiety, he goes for a late-night jog, but a confrontation with Angus later leads him to ask Tommy for help.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Coldwater, written by David Ireland, has a similar feel to a show we recently reviewed, The Game.

Our Take: Through the entire first episode of Coldwater, we were trying to figure out what Andrew Lincoln’s character John was all about. Sure, there are people around who are not good at confrontation and whose “fight or flight” instinct might always lean towards “flight,” but it seems that John is a different degree of scared. He’s a simpering mess, detatched from his job as his kids’ primary caregiver and so in his own head, he’d prefer to see a mom get the crap kicked out of her than help her.

We feel like there’s a backstory there, but we don’t get any in the first episode. We also don’t get any of the machinations involved in the family’s move from London to Coldwater in those two short months. How did this come together so quickly? And was it really driven by John’s trauma over his inaction at the playground and leaving his daughter behind as he fled?

It seems like running is a part of John’s personality: He ran from the attack; he ran after dropping the kids with Fiona, and he runs in the middle of the night after the “intruder” incident at his house. Will we ever find out what that’s all about?

None of that may matter eventually, because there’s something weird going on with the pious Tommy, and John will likely catch onto it at some point. There’s a whole lot of foreshadowing to all this, like Rebecca telling Fiona that she has no idea what goes on in the backyard shed Tommy works in. There’s discussion of a mysterious murder that occured in town some years earlier. Tommy and Rebecca’s son Cameron (Samuel Bottomley) is also weird as hell. It’s all pretty apparent that the more John gets involved with Tommy, the more he’ll regret it.

The tone of the show is also all over the place, veering from light humor to family drama to creepy serial killer drama. Dexter showed that those tones can be combined to great effect, but the shifts seem more jarring here.

Performance Worth Watching: We don’t know if Andrew Lincoln wanted to play the polar opposite of his Walking Dead role of Rick Grimes, but he plays John as such a wimp that we’re not even sure how he managed to marry and have children with the smart and fierce as Fiona.

Sex And Skin: There’s some scenes where Fiona tries to initiate relations with John, but they’re under covers and cut short by John’s foibles.

Parting Shot: Violet, who can’t sleep, encounters John cleaning blood off his face. He takes her and gets into bed with Fiona and Harry.

Sleeper Star: Indira Varma is fabulous as Fiona, but as we said earlier, we’re not sure how she stays married to a wet noodle like John.

Most Pilot-y Line: Rebecca, when the two couples are talking about the town’s mysterious murder, says “Oh, I love Satanic cults!” Remember, she’s the town’s pastor.

Our Call: STREAM IT. There’s a lot of entertaining weirdness going on in Coldwater, so much so that the problems we have with the characters and plotting might end up being overridden by it. So, even if the show isn’t all that good, it might still be fun to watch.

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How To Watch Coldwater

Paramount+ offers two subscription plans. The ad-supported Essential plan costs $7.99/month, while the ad-free Premium plan (which comes with Showtime and live CBS) costs $12.99/month. New subscribers can take advantage of a seven-day free trial.

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