In Now & Then, they know what you did 20 summers ago

Last November, in a column titled “Welcome To TV’s Era Of Peak Redundancy,” Time’s Judy Berman argued that the so-called Peak TV era had come to an end. Sure, streamers, cable channels, and broadcast networks may still be pumping out new shows like never before. But rather than signaling a wealth of prestige entertainment at our fingertips, we now find ourselves with a glut of shows that start to look eerily alike, all but indistinguishable from one another as each service and network tries to court the same broad audience.

It’s hard not to think about this while watching Now & Then, Apple TV+’s newest series, arguably their stab at having their own Big Little Lies. Or, is it their own Élite? Perhaps their own How To Get Away With Murder? Heck, you could make the argument it’s their banner Yellowjackets. Whether this Miami-set drama was cravenly conceived as a way to capitalize on what feels like a never-ending craze for murder whodunnits with a flashback-structure and subtle (if often clumsy) class dynamics at work, there’s no denying the feeling you’ve seen a version of this otherwise handsomely shot and well-acted series before.

It all begins with a crash. Well, a drunken party by the beach followed by a crash. Six college friends are celebrating their graduation and have decided to celebrate in style, even as the gathering (caught on camera by the would-be-documentarian of the bunch) slowly devolves into something slightly less celebratory, which in turn leads to the aforementioned crash. The tragedy risks derailing the dreams of those who survive. It’s why they decide to not call the police and opt instead to keep what happened to themselves. No one else was there; what could possibly go wrong?

Yes, the show may well also remind you of I Know What You Did Last Summer, especially when, 20 years later, the five survivors get a text threatening to out their lurid secret: two people died in the crash, but from the looks of it, neither did so from the collision. It’s a mystery that decades later still frustrates detective Flora Neruda (Rosie Perez, always a welcome presence on our screens), who was convinced back then that the five college grads had weaseled their way out of what always felt to her like a very suspicious car crash scene.

When the attempted blackmail and a reunion decades in the making leads to yet another murder, Neruda—no longer a rookie, now the wearied veteran on the force—knows she was right all along. And she’ll stop at nothing (do dogged cops on television ever do?) to find out what really happened that night all those years ago. That means following up with the survivors, who now include a mayoral candidate (with a personal secret of his own) and his ambitious wife, a moneyed plastic surgeon with a drug addiction, and a wayward lawyer who’s mixed up with the wrong crowd.

Shuttling back and forth between the two timelines, giving us backstory for what led to a bloody tragedy and how it’s affected the lives of all involved in the decades since, Now & Then sets up a solid whodunnit that’s helped in no small part by a game cast (including Roma’s Marina de Tavira, Pan’s Labyrinth’s Maribel Verdú and Who Killed Sara?’s Manolo Cardona). The structure may well feel rote in 2022, but it still manages to keep your attention and egg you onto watching the next episode to better understand the latest revelation. If we are to get these paperback thrillers by the dozen on our television screens, we may as well enjoy them when they’re as engaging as this Ramón Campos and Teresa Fernández-Valdés executive-produced drama.

The show is best when it embraces its pulpy sensibility (Illicit affairs! Hidden secrets! Convenient comas! Missing evidence!) and gives its actors juicy scenes where they have to assess who they can afford to trust even as they retreat back to the young kids they once were. Watching Marcos (Cardona) and Sofía (Verdú) reckon with their undeniable chemistry as he plans his wedding with his fiancée or getting to see Pedro and Anna (José María Yazpik and de Tavira) negotiate how to maintain the perfect facade of a power couple is never not a thrill. Now & Then is less successful, though, when it tries to feel topical amid all of that pulp. (The mayoral race subplot, in particular, feels both overdetermined and underbaked at the same time, while the forays into framing the story as one about privilege comes off as all too neat.)

If the final scene is any indication, everyone involved is hopeful for a second season, and that kind of vote of confidence suggests there is nothing if not room for yet another murder mystery that reboots and remakes itself from season to season to satiate our need for a world where cops solve murders by sheer willpower and justice is eventually doled out to those who operate, shielded by their money and power, as if they’re always above the law.