Emmy Rossum played Fiona Gallagher for nine seasons of Showtimes’s U.S. version of Shameless. That’s a long damn time and (unless we’re talking about daytime soaps), that’s rare job security for an actor, but at the same time, she also pretends to be other people for a living. And when one turns on that switch to be the same character for nearly a decade, you can see why they’d feel stifled (similar to what Elizabeth Olsen recently said about the MCU) and long to push toward the other end of the spectrum when granted the opportunity to do so. I’m not actually saying (because I don’t really know) that Rossum felt that way, but she sure suggests as much by veering into a completely different universe with the Angelyne limited series on Peacock.
Essentially, Emmy’s reinventing herself as an actress while portraying a character who reinvented herself. It’s kind-of circular, but sometimes reinvention can work our marvelously. Look at Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart, finally both free of Twilight, long after five movies and intense fandom and many years of aftermath. Now, he’s Batman, and she earned an Oscar nomination for her Princess Di performance. That all took awhile to happen, so one cannot expect to shake the Fiona off right away.
The end result of Emmy’s own departure is, well, not a home run. On one hand, she clearly had a fantastic time with this role. She really did that thing, you know, the “unrecognizable” thing with huge wigs, outlandish makeup, contact lenses, and a three pound breastplate. She’s also admitted to being obsessed with the Los Angeles billboard queen of the 1980s, and this show clearly wants to say something about why Ronia Tamar Goldberg, who went by a number of other aliases, ended up concocting the Angelyne identity. Yet, for most of this show’s runtime, I couldn’t figure out why the The Hollywood Reporter 2017 piece about unmasking Angelyne’s true identity needed to go further than the printed page. Onscreen, the story (which is obviously dramatized beyond the THR rendition) meanders for most of the series, seemingly without purpose. It’s simply not as interesting as it should be to compel in a bloated TV landscape.
Ultimately, this limited series is too self-indulgent and drags the central gimmick out far too long. Perhaps the project would have made a decent feature film, but as it stands the story’s too loosey goosey and aimless for a handful of installments. Then the final part aims to say something surprisingly deep and borderline profound, but by then, viewers might have already left the building after the aggressively immersive experience, all of which is novel at first, but it fades fast, despite all the colorful, Pepto-pink pops that persist. And I’m wondering whether Angelyne, a story that’s rooted in exploring identity and the nature of fame, is actually Emmy’s roundabout way of exploring her own identity.
In other words, I’m reading this as a trial run in the next phase of Emmy’s career. As a whole, the project spans a handful of episodes and comes to a definitive ending. The issue, however, is the mystery of Angelyne’s mystique arrives without substance or humor to balance out the cotton-candy confections and wigs and boobs and short skirts and Emmy gasping “Oooh!” at discrete intervals, for several episodes with a heavy mockumentary vibe and very little actual action. That’s especially the case since we’ve watched several Angelyne real-life followups (Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian, and so on), and our culture’s so saturated with Instagram influencers that it quickly grows old to watch Angelyne drive around in a pink corvette and push around her dude hanger-ons.
The series also aims to take a pointed look at celebrity how we view ourselves vs. how other people view us, and I’m not sure that it convinces itself of the points that it’s trying to make. And if we really need the overriding offense here, it’s that Hamish Linklater (of Netflix’s Midnight Mass and many other selections where he’s unsettled the bejesus out of people) generally spends his career either skeeving people out or intimidating them. There’s a little bit of understated coolness to Hamish, too, but here, my god, he’s the opposite of cool and is reduced to being walked all over. I’m appalled in one sense but also impressed that the hair, makeup, and wardrobe team were so committed to stripping away all of that charisma. It’s an astounding feat to do this to him.
Beyond that abomination, the supporting cast of characters includes a ton of men that end up doing her bidding for no reason at all. Lukas Gage, Alex Karpovsky, and Martin Freeman are among those actors playing thankless supporting roles (both for this show and to bask in Angelyne’s appearance at the top of the billboards). It’s an attempt to showcase a woman who (if one goes back to a 1987 interview) wasn’t as effusive and vivacious as Rossum portrays her but was one of the first to be “famous for nothing.” At this point, we’ve seen too much faux reality to find Angelyne, as a character, fascinating.
There’s no real game here (and no big scam, either), other than attention grabbing and waving around the crystal-and-UFO imagery and the whole living Barbie doll homage-routine. Again, there’s a sort-of point at the end of the series, if you can make it that long. Otherwise, this show will be a stepping stone, one that helps Emmy finally shake off the Fiona Gallagher scent before moving onto the next phase of her career, one that I’ll be looking forward to watching. Emmy Rossum rules, but Angelyne is a filler of space, and sound-and-bubbliness-signifying nothing, like staring at a billboard for five hours.
Peacock’s ‘Angelyne premieres on May 19.