Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Brand New Cherry Flavor’ On Netflix, An Oddball Horror Series About Early ‘90s Hollywood And Deranged Kittens

What is “horror” to you? Is it seeing a lot of blood and guts? Is it being scared and shocked? Or is it just seeing a lot of weird stuff going on that makes you scratch your head at times and just say, “Ewwww” at others? The new Netflix series Brand New Cherry Flavor tests what you think you like about the horror genre by giving you shocking moments that are more strange than scary.

BRAND NEW CHERRY FLAVOR: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A cat wriggles on a dark, windy road. A car is speeding down that road, the driver fiddling with the radio. The cat manages to get out of the way right before the car smushes it pieces.

The Gist: Lisa Nova (Rosa Salazar) is driving that car, a beat-up ’70s-era Trans Am. A graphic says: “EARLY ’90s. On The Way to Los Angeles.” Lisa stops to call a former boyfriend she knows in LA and tells him she’s on the way and can she crash at his place. All the while a mysterious man on a motorcycle is hovering nearby.

When she gets to LA she finds the apartment of her ex, Code (Manny Jacinto), whose girlfriend Christine (Hannah Levien) is more than a little wary of her. But she’s also one of the few people hanging around the flat that’s not in the business; she’s in real estate.

Lisa is there to meet a big-time producer, Lou Burke (Eric Lange), who showed interest in the horror short she made and sent around (on VHS in those days). When she meets him, he’s the usual Hollywood big-shot quirky: Wearing sunglasses indoors, drinking coffee with his sushi, spewing all sorts of bromides about his experiences in show business. But he also likes her film and wants to make a feature version of it. She wants to direct as well as write. He promises that, and the contract he sends over after he options the short says she will direct.

Christine gets Lisa an apartment in a seedy neighborhood, where on one of her first nights there, she sees a group of cats eating from the carcass of what looks like a much bigger cat.

Lou takes Lisa under his wing, trying to shape her pitch and get her past the usual, “I love movies” and “I’m different from other directors” platitudes. He even takes her to a big Hollywood party to introduce her to a backer. There, she sees weird things like a mask that shows people’s thoughts on a screen, and she meets a weird lady named Boro (Catherine Keener), who his holding a cat and tells Lisa that “for you, I could hurt someone.” She scrawls the corner on which she lives on Lisa’s arm.

Before the party, Lou made a pass at Lisa, which she rejected. He tries a more overt pass when they stop on a cliff overlooking the city. When she rejects it and the ride home, he leaves. The next morning, Code tells Lisa that Lou is taking meetings with someone else to direct her film. She storms into his mansion demanding answers. He just gives bromides on “promises vs. arrangements” and others. But when he chokes her in his driveway, she goes to the corner inscribed on her arm and looks for Boro. And then things get really, really weird.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Brand New Cherry Flavor feels like a Hollywood cautionary tale like Hollywood or even something like Episodes told in a style that evokes Twin Peaks.

Our Take: It’s hard to watch Brand New Cherry Flavor, created by Nick Antosca and Lenore Zion, without thinking the entire time, “Huh. This show is pretty freakin’ weird.” And weird can be good; there are some shows that are weird in a good way, like Ultra City Smiths. Some are weird in an interesting way, like the aforementioned Twin Peaks. But Brand New Cherry Flavor just feels like it’s weird for weirdness sake. And that’s never a formula for anything that’s sustainable.

Don’t get us wrong, there’s actually a story that fills in around all the weirdness. But it’s not that complicated a story. A young woman comes to Hollywood to pursue her filmmaking career. She meets with a lecherous producer who wants to stick his tongue down her throat. When she rejects him, he exercises his power to make her life miserable. It’s a story that we all knew about before Harvey Weinstein got brought down, and there’s nothing particularly new about it in this context.

Eric Lange, so brilliant as a series of creeps and weirdos in shows like Unbelievable, does a great job here of making Lou into a quirky but seemingly harmless guy on a power trip who turns violent when he doesn’t get his way. Salazar plays well off him, though we couldn’t shake the feeling that the role of Lisa was written for Audrey Plaza, and the producers found and actress that looked and sounded like her when Plaza wasn’t available. That might not have been the case, and that shouldn’t count against Salazar’s performance, but we felt that it needed a little more eye-rolling snarkiness.

The only other character so far that distinguishes herself is Keener as Boro. We never thought we’d say this about anything Keener does, but she might not play Boro weird enough. The writers linger on her first meeting with Lisa a bit too long, where Boro tells her to feel like she’s inside of a cat like it’s a house then to mentally break stuff. And then when Lisa goes to her after the incident with Lou, we’re still not sure what her magic is or what kind of hurt she’s going to put on the smarmy producer. It obviously involves kittens to some degree, as the deranged final scene of the first episode shows.

But so much of the first episode leaves the relationships and story still undefined, leading the viewer to just concentrate on the weirdness. And that weirdness is so disconnected from the story during that first episode that it’s hard to see where the connection will eventually be made.

Sex and Skin: We see Lisa naked in her bathtub, when Boro’s cat suddenly appears. In Boro’s house, there’s a skinny, weird naked man sitting in amongst her plants.

Parting Shot: After a scene that needs to be seen to be believed, a sweaty Lisa tells Boro, “I want to set his life on fire.” Boro replies, “We can do that.”

Sleeper Star: Jeff Ward plays a well-known actor named Roy Hardaway. He’ll factor into the story somehow, though he doesn’t have a lot to do in the first episode.

Most Pilot-y Line: We know that setting the story in the “Early ’90s” gives the writers some leeway as far as music selections are concerned. But the song “Natural One” was played in one scene; that song came out in 1995, which doesn’t quite make it “Early ’90s”. Tighten that shit up, folks.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Brand New Cherry Flavor has its high points, but its story isn’t unique enough and its weirdness seems like the free-floating kind that makes most viewers scratch their heads at what they’re seeing.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream Brand New Cherry Flavor On Netflix