Sharp Objects never got its due

Five years ago, Jean-Marc Vallée's last project ever premiered on HBO.

The TV Scholar Hall of Fame consist of shows plucked from my personal favourites list. They are shows that have made a deep impact on my relationship to television as a medium. These newsletters are less deep dives than they are spoiler-free, highlighted reminders of their impact — but scroll until the end for a list of academic recommendations if you want to dig further. Sharp Objects is the first entry into this new column of my newsletter.

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Asked for a show recommendation, I once recorded a five minute voice note for a situationship on my love for Sharp Objects. I enthusiastically listed out everything about it that still stands out in today’s television landscape: the psychological Gothic horror miniseries was filmed using only natural light, a filmic rarity for a medium that prefers beauty lighting; the soundtrack, still on heavy rotation, is diegetic, meaning we only hear what the characters hear, creating a textured sonic landscape; the performances are at times so raw and top-tier good that Amy Adams and Patricia Clarkson, among others, have yet to top it, five years later. I never saw this situationship again, nor did he ever check in to say he watched, but it’s hard to shut me up about shows that cut this deep.

Sadly, it is the last project we will ever watch from Québécois director Jean-Marc Vallée, who brought his signature editing style from films like Wild to HBO for Big Little Lies, and works with a similar production team for Sharp Objects. Announced last year, a documentary on the director is in the works, but he hadn’t picked up a camera in the two years between Sharp Objects and his death. “I didn’t know it would be so demanding, but it’s a marathon, a Herculean effort for a director to direct all the episodes,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2018.

If you haven’t watched for some reason, the eight-episode miniseries follows newspaper journalist Camille Preaker (Adams) who returns to her home town to report on a missing girl following the death of another young girl the year before. Her editor thinks the opportunity to write on a possible serial killer from her home town might jolt her from her alcohol-fuelled funk, and although she’s not thrilled by the idea, she packs up her mini liquor bottles and takes on the assignment.

Her journey back to Wind Gap, the fictional town created by the book’s author Gillian Flynn (who also co-writes the show alongside Marti Noxon of Buffy fame), is a return back to the source of several layers of trauma, including the death of her sister. She drinks Absolut vodka out of clear water bottles and wears dark, skin-covering clothing to hide her cuts. Piece by piece, she starts to uncover what’s really going on in this small Missouri town, and how her own childhood might be more intertwined to the murder(s) than she think.

The textures of the show are vivid and thick, an outward manifestation of Camille’s depression and PTSD. She sees her dead sister everywhere, in flashbacks and in the dark corners of her mother’s house, and when her memories get too sharp, she numbs with more alcohol. In an essay for NECSUS, David Evan Richard writes about how Sharp Objects captures the unique embodied experiences of depression, and how the show brings depression to life in ways other shows have struggled to do so:

Sharp Objects visibly, audibly, and kinetically expresses core structures of embodied depressed experience – ‘corporealisation’, ‘detunement’, and ‘desynchronization’ – through its colour palette, woozy cinematography, discordant sound design, and arrhythmic editing.

…attending to its sensual and affective dimensions offers the opportunity to more thoroughly ‘make sense’ of depression as an embodied experience.

I also love what Richard has to say about the way Sharp Objects captures the real-life experience of depression’s manipulation of time — as anyone who has been depressed understands too well. Camille’s depression rises to the surface during her time reporting in Wind Gap, allowing her to understand and examine missing pieces of her traumatized youth that end up having a significant bearing on the plot’s resolution.

Episodes of depression involve a palpable ‘desynchronisation’: time seemingly dilates, slows, and is felt as a painful burden on depressed subjects who are seemingly stuck in the past or unable to imagine a brighter future. Time also seems to lose its temporal depth, with past, present, and future congealing into an undifferentiated mass.

I went back into my journals from the summer of 2018 and good god was I depressed, reeling from having torn myself apart to finish writing my master’s thesis, smoking too much weed, and trying to navigate my first relationship. It was also a year, and more generally an era, I suppose, of the end of pre-Trump optimism, which wore on a lot of us heavily. It’s not surprising the show resonated so much as I watched it weekly (on Sunday nights, of course).

Sharp Objects keeps its cards close to the chest until a riveting final two episodes, a slow-burn with such a precisely artful look it makes Mare of Easttown look cheap in comparison. I re-watched a few months later, after having read the book and unable to get it off my mind, in the hopes catching unseen details in the first few episodes would help me extinguish the show’s hold on my consciousness (that’s how you know a show has done its job). I re-watched it again with my mom a few years later during the pandemic (she’s still traumatized by some of the memorable imagery). And finally this week, for a fourth time. It still holds up.

Criminally, Sharp Objects didn’t win a single Emmy award. It did not dominate awards season, and will not be remembered by how many trophies it collected. It was a stiff year for competition against Chernobyl, and Amy Adams lost out to Michelle Williams for Fosse/Verdon, while Patricia Clarkson was bested by the other Patricia, Arquette, for Escape at Dannemora.

Eliza Scanlen wasn’t nominated for anything, but absolutely a breakout performance for the actress playing Amma, Camille’s step sister. Chris Messina was fantastic too, and finally allowed me the chance to differentiate him from “the guy in The Mindy Project.” The show never even received a directing nomination for Vallée, who will never be up for the award again. I’ll always be a bit bitter, I think, that it never quite got its due in that sense. But gosh, it will always be on my mind, a show that did so many things right, and easily one of the most haunting miniseries I’ve watched.

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Further academic reading:

• “Episodes of depression: Existential feelings and embodiment in Sharp Objects” by David Evan Richard in NECSUS (May 2019)

• “Female Body Language: Cutting, Scarring, and Becoming in HBO’s Sharp Objects,” by Mihaela P. Harper in a chapter for Female Agencies and Subjectivities in Film and Television (Oct 2020)

• “‘I’m Persephone, Queen of the Underworld’: Metramorphic swerves away from death in HBO’s Sharp Objects” by Caitlin Audrey Janzen in Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (Nov 2022)

• “White Material: Ivory tiles, white womanhood, and white supremacy in Jean-Marc Vallée’s Sharp Objects” by Emily Sanders in Film-Philosophy (Feb 2023)

I recognize these are paywalled as many academic articles are. I recommend “borrowing” a friend’s university login like I did.