Candy

What can we learn from Candy? Outside of casting its stars with consistency, not much really. But sometimes that's sweet enough.

And, while it's no fault of the creators, it’s hard to shake the feeling that “Candy” is just more familiar now than it would have been a decade ago when true crime wasn’t such a content machine. The creators of “Candy” wash their show in a too-dark, muted, brown palette that gets overdone. As for Biel, she has really turned a corner in terms of performance in the last few years, doing her career-best work on the excellent “The Sinner,” and proving here that that was no fluke. And the stellar Lynskey expresses the numbing depression of suburbia in a way that doesn’t feel clichéd. She does so much with just a sigh or defeated body language. She becomes increasingly turned on by romance novels and is inspired by a friend’s second chance at happiness after a divorce to find a new spark in her life. Nick Antosca (“The Act”) and Robin Veith (“Mad Men”) unpack the days before and after this event with stark, horror-esque storytelling in Hulu’s “Candy,” an effective five-hour mini-series that will unfold over five consecutive nights on the streaming giant, starting tonight, May 9th.

Jessica Biel & Melanie Lynskey are excellent in Hulu's docudrama about a bizarre 1980 murder in smalltown Texas. NOW STREAMING: ...

Though the final two episodes sag a bit when they lean into the camp luridness aspect that far too many true crime docudramas enjoy (see Peacock’s The Thing About Pam as a recent example), and the courtroom antics of Candy’s showboating attorney ( Raul Esparza, who should be able to play these kinds of roles in his sleep by now), Candy for the most part is understated and sensitive. Deciding that the answer to her problem is to have a fling (which has never solved any relationship problem ever, in the history of relationships), Candy hungrily eyes the men on her volleyball team, and sets her cap for the shy, awkward Allen, with whom she engages in the most depressing for everyone involved affair since Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm. It was a tragedy regardless of the circumstances, and more so when you realize that either Candy or Betty being in therapy, with an actual therapist as opposed to a pastor with an agenda, or the cult-like “Marriage Encounter,” might have prevented everything that happened. Candy and Betty are both married to a couple of boring drips who, if not for Allen’s shitty mustache, could easily be mistaken for each other, and while they’re not bad husbands, exactly, they’re blind to their wives’ distress and take them for granted. Candy, married to Pat ( Timothy Simons), seems to love being a housewife and mother, while Betty, married to Allen ( Pablo Schreiber), is miserable, left alone for days at a time while Allen travels for his job. However, though Hulu’s Candy is the first of two takes on the same 40 year-old murder to come out this year (HBO Max’s Love and Death, starring Elizabeth Olsen and Lily Rabe, is the other, release date TBA), for the first few episodes at least it treats its gruesome, sobering subject with respect and seriousness, and the individuals involved as real people as opposed to caricatures and archetypes.

Odd and tense, "Candy" burnishes Jessica Biel's crime-based limited series credentials, following her star-producer turn in "The Sinner.

Yes, it has plenty of company in this particular genre, but thanks to the principals, it's a tastier treat than most. Given the popularity murder and infidelity as the backdrop for true crime, it's hard to stand out from that crowd. That makes the series of events feel even more shocking and sad, with Betty raising a baby and upset about how much her husband travels for work, telling him when they take in an unhappy foster child, "I can't handle another person in this house who doesn't want to be here."

Before watching 'Candy' on Hulu or the upcoming 'Love and Death' on HBO, here's what you need to know about Candy Montgomery, Betty Gore, and this complex ...

Montgomery then took a shower at the Gore household, returned to church, then got lunch with her friends. While on trial, Montgomery gave her account of what happened, claiming that when she stopped by Gore’s house on June 13, the other woman asked Montgomery if she was having an affair with Gore’s husband. That’s when Gore threatened Montgomery with an axe and told her to stay away from her family. But while Candy Montgomery was close with Betty, she was even closer to Allan Gore. The two started having an affair, which began in December of 1978 and lasted until October of 1979. Initially, authorities thought that a drifter was responsible for the crime. As both Hulu’s Candy and HBO’s Love and Death will show, the cause of her death wasn’t a random drifter or a family member.

This is not an evil person. This is not a deeply violent human being,” Biel tells Vanity Fair. “This is someone who is just like all of us.”

It was funny, every time we would go to a set, I would just look around and be like, We had that, we had that, we had that.” “What this woman goes through and what happens to her in the story and the choices that she makes—I mean, Robin and I still talk about it to this day. “When you take a case from 1980 where we don’t have any sort of digital evidence, any sort of photographic evidence, you have the word of one woman, and then you have some dodgy signs because of the time,” Veith says. What would that look like, to have this tremendous event in your life and then just go on?” (Subsequent episodes flash between the present-day timeline and years earlier, with Lynskey’s Gore emerging as a colead in the series.) We see that she’s heavily involved with her community, always around to lend a hand to friends and neighbors—including Gore, whose daughter remains in Montgomery’s care after having a sleepover the night before. As has been exhaustively discussed in and out of court, Montgomery and Gore became entangled after Montgomery launched into an affair with Gore’s husband, Allan (Pablo Schreiber). How that led to Candy’s killing of Betty in the latter’s own home—and how any confrontation could ever come to such a gruesome end, whether it was self-defense, accidental, or in cold blood—remains the subject of intense debate.

Find out the filming locations for the Jessica Biel Hulu series, Candy.

Interiors of places like the Gore’s home were filmed on a sound stage. Series producer Michael Uppendahl has confirmed that most of the show used the Atlanta area as a stand-in for Texas, saying, “We shot it in Georgia. We were based in Atlanta, and we were able to shoot it around Georgia. I was shocked at how well the things were able to match up. In a trial that lasted eight days in Collin County, TX, a jury acquitted Candy of the crime on Oct. 29, 1980.