When an enigmatic young man (Chai Hansen) enters the Yorks' lives, their quiet existence is quickly upended and the mystifying chamber they thought they knew so well turns out to be much more than they could ever have imagined.Chuck Hodes/Courtesy of Amazon Prime Video
Far be it from me to quote Simone de Beauvoir at you, but it’s relevant. In her neglected book The Coming of Age, published in France in 1970, de Beauvoir takes a largely pessimistic view of the way society treats the elderly. It’s an odd book, and today seems Eurocentric and blinkered. But its central thesis holds water: We treat old people badly out of a sense of terror at our own aging.
She wrote, “Society cares about the individual only in so far as he is profitable. The young know this. Their anxiety as they enter in upon social life matches the anguish of the old as they are excluded from it.” Now, a lot has changed since 1970, and then again, not so much. The retired and elderly are a significant consumer market now, but where they truly live, love and thrive is unexplored territory.
Night Sky (streams on Amazon Prime) sets out to scrutinize that territory and generally succeeds in finding valuable material while also wandering off on confounding paths. At its centre is a long-married couple. They are Franklin (J.K. Simmons) and Irene (Sissy Spacek) York, both in their seventies, and retired. He was a carpenter, she was a school teacher, and they live alone on the edge of a town in middle America.
Catch up on the best streaming TV of 2021 with our holiday guide
First, you note how involved these people are, and are struck by the gravity of the performances. Spacek is terrifically charismatic as a woman looking serenely at her fragile friends, while a simmering anxiety about her own health and strength is below the surface. Simmons is giving a master class here. What a career he has had. A character actor and ubiquitous in those insurance commercials, he emerges at intervals to provide astonishing performances, as he did in HBO’s Oz, the Starz series Counterpart and the movie Whiplash. Here his Franklin is all kindness, a codger on the surface, but armed with a steeliness and wit that, like Irene’s anxiety, is just there, if you look for it.
Franklin and Irene have a secret. Years before, they discovered a window in the basement of a shed on their property that gives them a view of a planet in outer space. Is it imagined, or a portal to some other reality? We don’t know and the couple simply use the vista as something to enjoy of an evening before bedtime. What kickstarts the shifts away from Irene and Franklin is Irene’s discovery of a young man in that shed. He says is name is Jude (Chai Hansen), claims amnesia and is definitely injured. Irene nurses him back to health and Franklin is wary.
The storyline then shifts to Argentina, specifically to the high mountains (spectacular visuals abound) where a llama farmer, Stella (Julieta Zylberberg) and her teenage daughter Toni (Rocio Hernandez) live with their own closely guarded space that looks like a church. And there’s a menacing gunman (Piotr Adamczyk), who might be menacing because he’s worried about that secret space, or that guy Jude. It’s unclear and deliberately so until, three episodes in, the strands become connected.
There are eight episodes of Night Sky, but Amazon Prime Video has just cancelled the show.Chuck Hodes/Courtesy of Amazon Prime Video
What we have here is an intricate mystery-puzzle that might frustrate some viewers. It’s the first drama from creator Holden Miller, who says the idea came to him after spending time with his grandparents, who were in their eighties and he observed the texture of their long relationship. He was asking, “What does it all add up to?”
Viewers might ask the same question of Night Sky. While the parallel story anchored in Argentina might seem disconnected, it isn’t. At one point that menacing figure isn’t speaking Spanish, he’s using Latin and says, “Ad Maioren Dei Gloriam” (For the greater glory of God), which is the motto of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits). Perhaps the mystery here is not so much a sci-fi puzzle but a question being asked about religion and its power to influence people across centuries. Perhaps what Irene and Franklin gaze upon in that shed, near the end of their lives, is either heaven or hell.
As long as the series is focused upon those two elderly people it is heavenly to watch. It is a rare example of looking upon the elderly with only benign admiration, tenderness and authentic respect. Irene and Franklin are not cute codgers; they are fully formed characters whose strengths are more outsized than their frailties.
There are eight episodes and here’s the kicker – although a second season was planned, Amazon Prime Video has just cancelled the show. And so, we should ask, does de Beauvoir’s pessimism remain justified?
Plan your screen time with the weekly What to Watch newsletter. Sign up today.