Destiny comes crashing in Alfonso Cuarón’s Disclaimer* trailer

Disclaimer*: *This might be your new favorite show.

Even if it doesn’t live up to the hype, a miniseries from Alfonso Cuarón was always going to be a television event. Luckily for fans of the Roma and Children Of Men director, it doesn’t seem like there will be too much to worry about in that regard. The series snagged some suitably major talent in Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline, and Sacha Baron Cohen, and also features a score composed by Grammy and Oscar-winner Finneas O’Connell. It also just looks really beautiful, as we’ve come to expect from the five-time Academy Award-winning filmmaker. Maybe the era of “Peak TV” isn’t over after all.

In the series, which was adapted from Renée Knight’s best-selling novel of the same name, Blanchett plays Catherine Ravenscroft, an acclaimed journalist who built her reputation and career around exposing the misdeeds of others. She also has a secret, however, which she finds detailed in black-and-white in a novel sent to her home by an unknown author (Kline) trying to get revenge. On the cover page, it bears an inscription (also appended to the end of the trailer): “Any resemblance to persons living or dead is not a coincidence.”

The logline continues: “As Catherine races to uncover the writer’s true identity, she is forced to confront her past before it destroys both her own life and her relationships with her husband Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen) and their son Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee).”

As the parts of her life that Catherine has “concealed from the world” start to come to light, she’s forced to confront the type of shame she’s brought on others. “It’s as old as humanity. We have an immense facility to create judgments,” Cuarón said in an interview with Vanity Fair. “But there’s a pleasure about it. You can see it nowadays in how easily people jump onto the bandwagon. That is a part of humanity that makes us feel a bit above, that makes us feel a bit more comfortable with ourselves. ‘There’s always someone that is a bit worse than me.'”

Disclaimer* also features Lesley Manville, Louis Partridge, Leila George, Hoyeon, and Indira Varma as the narrator. The first two episodes premiere October 11 on Apple TV+, followed by new episodes every Friday.