Sirens Is Not Bad. It’s Just There
It’s the kind of show you watch all the way through and then forget 15 minutes later. Is it stylish? Yes. Is it trying to say something profound about wealth and power and sisterhood and culty white women? Maybe. But the entire time, I kept asking: Haven’t I seen this before? And wasn’t it also on a beach? And wasn’t Kidman definitely in it?
The plot is a blender of prestige-drama ingredients:
One mysterious island estate
One rich manipulative woman
One slightly unhinged ex-con sister
A side of emotional trauma, slow zooms, and Kevin Bacon
It’s watchable. It’s even pretty. But it’s also deeply, aggressively predictable. It’s a beach-read thriller pretending to be a psychological study.
The Bacon Factor
Let’s take a moment for Kevin Bacon, who is, let’s be honest, the main reason I finished the whole thing. There’s something about 70-year-old Kevin Bacon that feels like a comforting reminder that not all the actors from the ’90s disappeared into Marvel roles or wellness retreats. He just shows up. Does his job. Delivers smolder and confusion in equal measure.
We salute you, sir.
The Nicole-Julianne Glitch
I love Julianne Moore. But the entire time she was on screen, my brain was glitching. Not because she wasn’t good (she was!). But because the character she plays- ice-cold, mysterious, vaguely threatening but maybe just emotionally damaged- is a carbon copy of every character Nicole Kidman has played since 2017.
It’s giving “coastal elite mystery woman with secrets.”
And it begs the question: Are Julianne Moore and Nicole Kidman now the same person in prestige television? Is there a secret studio somewhere where they rotate scripts like musical chairs? One goes to Hulu, and the other goes to Netflix. Both wear high-neck silk blouses and stare out of windows dramatically.
Final Thoughts
Sirens isn’t terrible. It’s just another entry in the rich people misbehaving in a remote location genre, with a script that feels generated by an algorithm trained on The White Lotus, Big Little Lies, and a dash of Succession mood lighting.
You’ll finish it. You’ll probably enjoy parts of it. But you won’t remember much, and you’ll definitely keep thinking, “Wait… was that Nicole Kidman?”
No. But it almost was.
