Soap Opera Thriller

Disclaimer, Alfonso Cuarón’s new series on Apple TV+, is about narrative and its relationship to truth. The series is, at its core, a simple melodrama, but its layers of excessive voiceover tend to reduce narrative to literal narration. Disclaimer wants to tell a complicated story, but it does so by spelling out exactly what its characters are thinking and feeling. Insisting on the ambiguities of its narrative, it is an exercise in storytelling that also wants to make sure we do not miss its lesson.