‘Apples Never Fall’ showrunner Melanie Marnich on bringing the novel’s ‘page-turner energy’ to the screen [Exclusive Video Interview]
[WARNING: The following story contains spoilers about “Apples Never Fall.”]
“Apples Never Fall” showrunner Melanie Marnich was fortunate enough to receive galley copies of Liane Moriarty‘s latest mystery novel. Within the first 10 pages, she was hooked and knew she wanted to turn the page-turner into a limited series.
“It’s the life in Liane’s writing. I just immediately leapt into the world, leapt into the characters, leapt into their quirks. Like I felt like I knew them,” Marnich tells Gold Derby (watch above). “And it was so funny. The book was simultaneously dire and funny. I was like, ‘Ooh, this is exactly my cup of tea.’ Something bad happened and I’m laughing. That was really delightful. And also, for me, Liane did this incredible sleight of hand, where it was funny, it was harrowing, and she delivered these incredibly potent themes about love, marriage, commitment, forgiveness. I was like, ‘This is fascinating.’ For the roller coaster ride that it is, it’s always delivering these deep, deep powerful themes and kind of with the gloves off.”
“Apples Never Fall” focuses on the ostensibly perfect Delaney family, who are a tennis institution in southern Florida. Joy (Annette Bening) and Stan (Sam Neill) have just retired from their tennis academy, but retired life is anything but chill when a mysterious woman named Savannah (Georgia Flood) enters their lives and upends everything. When Joy goes missing one day, Stan and their four adult children — played by Jake Lacy, Alison Brie, Conor Merrigan Turner and Essie Randles — must confront the secrets, lies and resentment in their family. The novel shifts between past and present with multiple POVs. In bringing it to the screen, Marnich landed on a format of seven episodes that jump back and forth in time, each one told from the POV of the six Delaney family members, with the premiere told from that of the whole family. “I originally envisioned it as eight episodes,” she shares. :And then it dawned on me, there’s a version where we could do this very compartmentalized thing. Eliminate the eight, get it down to seven and then you know exactly what the machine. Suddenly, when I figured out that structural conceit, narrative conceit, I was like, ‘OK, now I know what the machine is. And it’s really, really precise and it’s as muscular as the book.'”
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Despite the serious and suspenseful subject matter, like the novel, there is a lightness and wit to the Peacock series. “The book has that page-turner energy and the question was how to bring that energy to the show,” Marnich continues. “We would break episodes, we would break scenes … but I would look at it and go, ‘OK, what’s the ‘Apples’ version?’ And it was always bringing a little weirdness to it or something unexpected. There was something I wanted to create that was very propulsive but it also had to be surprising.”
Like with any book adaptation, there are some differences from the novel, but the resolution and ending remain intact. Joy was not missing or, as it appeared, dead, but she, feeling under-appreciated by her family, had gone off with Savannah, hiding out in her off-the-grid Georgia home. In the finale, told from Joy’s POV, Joy explains to Savannah why she wanted her family to “miss me for once” in a monologue that Marnich wrote after the writers’ strike ended that underscores the universal feeling of loving someone but not liking them all the time.
“First of all, writing anything for Annette Bening is a dream come true. I would watch her read a menu. That woman is incredible,” Marnich says. “I think there was a version of a monologue [pre-strike]. It all blends together in terms of drafts, but having learned so much prior to the strikes what made these characters tick, what they felt like, how potent the actors’ performances were really informed that. And having seen the relationship between Joy and Stan during production and becoming more lived in. Getting to know Annette and talking to her about the character and what she would like to see in it. It was really fun to write. It felt really satisfying. And also she can say those things and yet we will find out under it all is great love. And these things aren’t mutually exclusive. You can say, ‘I think we’re broken,’ but that doesn’t mean you also don’t love this person. Or ‘I’ve had it with my children.’ It doesn’t mean you don’t love them. As a woman who’s been a caretaker and has done certain things in life and there’s a certain accretion of exhaustion — just tapping into that, just kind of letting it go. It was really fun to write and knowing that she would deliver it virtuosically.”
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