Roar Review: A Timely but Toothless Anthology of Female Troubles

Adapted from Cecelia Aher’s short story collection of the same name, Roar uses the anthology format to tackle women’s issues from a variety of perspectives. Tonally, the series is a mix of comedy and sobering drama along the lines of creators Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch’s GLOW. Like that series, it also tends to reserve its most meaningful stories for its white characters. The leading women of Roar are, across the board, cisgender, straight, and—unless the plot specifically calls for otherwise—thin, white, and in their 30s.

The show’s topics, at least, are varied enough, often building grounded stories around more fanciful premises. One woman (Betty Gilpin), at the behest of her husband (Daniel Dae Kim), agrees to sit on a shelf for several years, while another (Issa Rae) disappears from the minds of others, who at first stop hearing her voice and then stop being able to see her altogether.

The episodes’ straightforward plots are reflected in their titles: “The Woman Who Was Kept on a Shelf,” “The Woman Who Disappeared,” and “The Woman Who Solved Her Own Murder.” Roar’s stories are concerned with theme to the detriment of all else, and perhaps that approach works just fine on the page; with 30 different stories, Ahern’s book certainly doesn’t linger on any one for long. But when expanded to even relatively modest half-hour episodes, Roar feels more like a series of free-floating metaphors tied limply to the skeleton of a plot.

“The Woman Who Was Kept on a Shelf” has long made its point before saying it out loud just in case, when Gilpin’s character claims that she’s been kept “like a trophy.” The details of her predicament might, in the right hands, have focused on the logistics of her escape or the way she’s cared for while seated in her immovable position. Instead, Roar is content to show us scene after scene of a woman on her shelf while her husband gradually loses interest.

If nothing else, the series is surprisingly good at building a layered history for its characters, using their careers, aspirations, and relationships to avoid making them simple functions of a given episode’s premise. At their core, the stories have the substance of a single-panel comic strip, but they take infinitely longer to make their points.

“The Woman Who Was Fed by a Duck,” in which Merritt Wever’s character starts a relationship with a talking duck, especially takes its time. The woman keeps the duck in the bathtub and has to remember to let him out so he doesn’t shit everywhere in protest. But even here, when the duck turns out to be just as capable of abuse as a human partner, the series doesn’t complicate this premise in inventive ways so much as drag its feet to an obvious destination.

Elsewhere, “The Woman Who Returned Her Husband” uses the fundamental absurdity of its story, in which a 60-year-old woman (Meera Syal) cashes in the warranty on her layabout husband (Bernard White) and begins to experiment with new models, for a touching look at marriage once the spark of romance has been extinguished. It successfully explores our willingness to fall into patterns and give up on the people we’re supposed to love.

“The Woman Who Found Bite Marks on Her Skin” veers into body horror, as a mother (Cynthia Erivo) struggles to balance her demanding job with her home life. Even this disturbing premise, though, falters under the show’s stubborn insistence on tidily resolving things, not only in its unambiguous language, but in giving every episode a relatively uplifting conclusion. While this strange mandate is almost certainly meant to counterbalance any possible wallowing in the hardships of the marginalized, it also kneecaps much of the emotional impact, with everything reliably and unceremoniously confronted before the credits roll.