Ask anybody exterior of Los Angeles who Angelyne is, and it’s possible you’ll be greeted with a confused shrug. However, for Angelenos of a specific era, she was a hyper-local legend: the mysterious blonde bombshell who all of a sudden appeared on billboards throughout the town in 1984, providing little elaboration apart from her title in sizzling pink lettering and her busty body in a single pin-up pose or one other. She was “famous for being famous” lengthy earlier than Paris Hilton or the Kardashians, promoting nothing extra (or much less) than herself, driving round in her bubblegum-pink Corvette, and signing autographs at 35 bucks a pop.
However, who is Angelyne, anyway? The reply, as posited in Peacock’s restricted sequence concerning the determine, is “whatever Angelyne wants herself to be.” Based mostly on Gary Baum’s articles on Angelyne for The Hollywood Reporter and created by Nancy Oliver (“True Blood,” “Six Feet Under”), “Angelyne” makes merry play of the strains between identification and delusion, and does it with all of the bubbly verve of the real-life determine it’s digging at. It’s sensible stuff.
“I am not a woman,” Angelyne (Emmy Rossum) coos to herself within the opening moments of the sequence. “I am an icon.” Her eyes are closed, her supply certain; within the parlance of our occasions, she’s manifesting. She shapes her actuality, and over “Angelyne”’s 5 episodes, that want for management over her personal self-perception—and our notion of her—extends to the aesthetic cloth of the present itself. What outcomes is a winking camp opus concerning the liberating energy of delusion, and simply how far you may take a fantasy if you may get everybody else to imagine it together with you?
Every of the sequence’s 5 episodes, directed by Lucy Tcherniak (“The End of the F***king World”) and Matt Spicer (“Ingrid Goes West,” one other arch story of a lady reinventing herself in LA), largely heart themselves across the folks—principally males—who’ve been sucked into Angelyne’s gravitational pull and slingshot out the opposite facet, supporting gamers in her rags-to-riches-to-??? story. There’s Freddy (Charlie Rowe), the himbo rocker whose up-and-coming rock band Angelyne Yokos her means into, and promptly destroys to construct publicity for herself. There’s Harold Wallach (Martin Freeman), the unassertive billboard printer who will get roped into being Angelyne’s supervisor by sheer drive of will; Max Allen (Lukas Gage), who tried to movie a documentary about her in her later years to no avail; Jeff Glasner (Alex Karpovsky), the fictionalized model of Baum who tries to dispassionately examine her previous; the record goes on. Regularly, we minimize from the motion to stylized, Errol Morris-Esque speaking head interviews explaining the methods Angelyne evaded or damaged.
However then! “Ew, gross,” Angelyne pouts in response to a very salacious element. “That did not happen.” She takes management of the narrative once more, and all of a sudden we’re seeing issues from her rigorously curated perspective. She’s the form of a lady who has invented herself, her life, and her persona from complete fabric and used her magnetism to evade any inconvenient bursts of the actuality that may encroach. “Angelyne” realizes this in a darkly-funny element, proper right down to characters from her enigmatic previous blipping from the display screen the second she decides they don’t exist.
The present’s clearly an ardor venture for Rossum, herself on the lookout for a metamorphosis of kinds after her nine-season run on Showtime’s “Shameless” as the sensible, pragmatic daughter of a working-class Chicago household. The place Rossum’s prior roles noticed her because the wise brunette, her Angelyne is a wide-eyed, bottle-blonde, sizzling pink Christmas ornament; she titters like Betty Boop, allotting one florid pearl of knowledge after one other (“I strive for a painless existence”) in that breathy Marilyn Monroe voice. Very like Lily James in “Pam & Tommy” final 12 months, Rossum dons a 30-pound breastplate and all of the foot-high blonde wigs she will muster to seize the true Angelyne’s cartoonish proportions. She instructions the room, demanding all eyes on herself and solely letting the barest crack of an actual self by means of; its outstanding research in manufactured notion.
By God, the layers of artifice work like gangbusters: in spite of everything, Angelyne, like Rossum, are each girl trying to redraw themselves to point out to the world what they’ll do, to demand the eye they really feel they deserve. “Marilyn didn’t rest until she was famous,” she says early on; it’s clear, even earlier than the ultimate episode the place we get a peek at the true lady’s pre-Angelyne childhood, that the Hollywood star was a pivotal determine in her life—a shiny, cheery intercourse image everybody who mattered needed to take a look at. And in LA, the place everyone seems to be clamoring to be seen, Angelyne knew precisely the best way to make it occur, even when she didn’t have the pipes or the appearing expertise to leverage it into a precise profession in leisure. All different particulars that disrupt that phantasm are inconveniences to be excised.
It’s this push and pull between competing truths that make the present so deceptively humorous, and unite it aside from the glut of current miniseries about controversial real-life figures we’ve needed to wade by means these days. The place Elizabeth Holmes or Adam Neumann offered a lie, Angelyne sells fantasy; the stakes aren’t lives or livelihoods, however, whether or not or not she will get to take care of her magnificence, attraction, and mystique. She surrounds herself with sycophants (her most loyal being Hamish Linklater’s uproariously slavish assistant Rick Krause) and carries an uncanny means to spin any damaging circumstance as a constructive—or faux it didn’t occur altogether. (Rossum’s husband, “Mr. Robot” creator Sam Esmail, additionally produces right here, if that’s any indicator as to the mega-meta antics the present ultimately bleeds into.)
Whether or not you’re studying about Angelyne for the primary time, or a longtime fan hoping for an entertaining overview of her legend, there’s rather a lot to love right here. Sure, you’ll get a couple of glimmers of perception into what made the true determine tick (although don’t maintain out hope for a cameo), a couple of layers peeled again into considered one of LA’s most bombastic, bimbo-tastic mysteries. However “Angelyne”’s true energy lies in its nuanced embrace of the lie, reveling within the sizzling pink happiness she provides herself and her followers for merely current while acknowledging the damage and confusion she inflicts on these in her wake. Magnificence, as they are saying, is within the eye of the beholder; the identical goes for fame.