The protagonist of _Phony_, a delightfully genre-defying Hulu series best miscategorized as a thriller, is the kind of teenage boy any mother would brag about. Played by Sam Nivola, who’s best known for portraying gentle sons of privilege in _The White Lotus_and _The Perfect Couple_, Sonny Cooke is that one kid everyone in school knows and likes. He’s as comfortable with the jocks as he is with the theater set; his friendly, nonjudgmental presence sets his peers at ease.
You’d think this would be especially tough to achieve when your mom, Connie Britton’s Ellen, is the principal, but if anything, the proximity of a single parent with whom he shares a fierce bond adds to his ease. Driving to his girlfriend Chloe’s (Mahaela Park) house, with plans to have sex for the first time and a blue vibrator in tow as a sort of talisman against performance anxiety, he crashes into an eerie pond. When he awakens in the hospital a week later, banged up but healing, the woman who greets him looks slightly yet decisively different from the mother he knows better than anyone. (Britton’s subtle transformation is rendered, quite effectively, through a combination of makeup and visual effects.) No one else seems to notice the change.
They chalk up Sonny’s insistence that this new Ellen is a phony to the lingering effects of his accident. He fights with his skeptical best friend, Vogel (Maliq Johnson), and drifts toward outsiders Mallory (Grace Brennan), a junior-high love interest who’s back in class after years of being homeschooled by evangelical parents, and her geeky cousin, Weldon (Colter Lee), who are bored enough to help investigate. Maliq Johnson, left, and Sam Nivola in Phony David Astorga—Disney With its cliffhangers and deceptions, _Phony_ has the bones of a thriller.
But since a big part of the mystery is whether Ellen’s new face is the result of a crime, some supernatural occurrence, or truly all in Sonny’s head, it can’t lean on the overused conventions of any particular thriller subgenre. Instead, its comedy-veteran showrunners, creator Nick Paley (_Marcel the Shell With Shoes On_, _Broad City_) and Anthony King (_The Afterparty_, _Rooster_), give their half-hour series the vibe of a coming-of-age dramedy, albeit a decidedly uncanny one. There’s a lot of humor, often of the awkward-adolescent variety, in the characters, performances, and dialogue.
That this atmosphere feels natural—grounding Sonny’s crisis in the real social world of teens’ funny, stressful, horny, mundane, phone-mediated daily lives—rather than painfully quirky, is a testament to the show’s delicate execution. People have idiosyncrasies. Sonny and Chloe call each other Bobo; his mom used to cook him a dish they refer to, without expository intervention, as Chicken Nummers.
The school counselor (Kelvin Yu) is a frustrated musician, and his faux-casual attempts to get students to listen to his record are played for laughs, but he’s not just a joke. In fact, Paley and King almost always resist tired tropes. Nothing would be easier than a Chloe-Sonny-Mallory love triangle straight out of every teen drama ever.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
