Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | TV | October 26, 2026
Connie Britton has a new series on Hulu, Phony, and it’s a fun coming-of-age mystery. If you’re a journey-not-the-destination kind of viewer, I wholeheartedly recommend it. If the destination matters to you, however, the jury is still out, and I’ll be honest: I’m skeptical the mystery can be resolved in a satisfying way.
Here’s the premise: Sonny (Sam Nivola) is a high schooler. Nice, average kid — a little charming, a little dorky. He’s extremely close with his mother, Ellen (Connie Britton), who also happens to be the principal of his school. There’s no father in the picture, and Sonny and Ellen tell each other everything … except Sonny neglects to mention his plan to have sex with his girlfriend, Chloe (Mahaela Park).
It’s his first time, and for reasons known only to Sonny, he decides to bring along a, uh, adult toy. His mother finds it, and the two get into a fight, because as close as they are, Ellen clearly has some control issues. She more or less yells at her son and storms out, but Sonny heads off to see his girlfriend anyway. En route, he runs his car off the road and winds up in a coma for several days.
Here’s where it gets weird: When Sonny wakes up, his mom looks different. She still looks like Connie Britton, just Connie Britton with some prosthetic adjustments.
The thing is, no one else notices. When Sonny flips through old pictures of his mom, she looks like the supposed imposter in every one of them — except the photo on her Costco membership card. No one believes Sonny when he insists this woman is not his mother, except Welton (Colter Lee), the cousin of Mallory, a girl Sonny once hooked up with and clearly still has feelings for. Welton connects Sonny with a private detective who reluctantly takes the case.
Honestly, I have no idea what the hell is going on, and I am dying to know. It seems to involve a body recovered at the site of Sonny’s accident and a break-in at his house while he was in the coma. Beyond that, I’m flummoxed — it plays like The Mandela Effect: The TV Show. Did Sonny wake up in a parallel universe where his mother looks slightly different? Is he still in a coma, dreaming all of this?
And that’s the thing about Phony. I like it. I’m invested in the characters. It’s a neat mystery. But unless Damon Lindelof is lurking somewhere behind the scenes, I don’t see how this resolves satisfyingly — or at least without something supernatural or multidimensional — because if Ellen was replaced by an imposter, why wouldn’t anyone else notice? She looks very different. It’s glaringly obvious. Or maybe the accident scrambled Sonny’s brain. I don’t know. I want to know very badly. I also suspect I’ll be disappointed.
But I still dig the series. It’s a real head-scratcher of a coming-of-age mystery, and it stars Connie Britton. What’s not to love?
