The Problem with Peacock's 'Apples Never Fall' Is Its Infuriating Ending [Spoilers]

The only thing I remember from Liane Moriarty’s Apples Never Fall is that it was the second book I read in 2022 about tennis that wasn’t really about tennis (the other was Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Carrie Soto Is Back, although David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest also falls into this category); that it wasn’t a particularly engaging novel; and that the annoying ending turned a mediocre novel into a bad one.

The ending, while bad, wasn’t memorable enough to stick, so while watching the Peacock series based on the novel, in the back of my mind, I knew the conclusion was going to annoy me, but I didn’t remember why. Therefore, after watching all seven episodes, I was able to experience that feeling of crushing disappointment all over again!

Here’s the issue (and I am going to spoil the ending here): Apples Never Fall is set up like a family drama/murder mystery, but the “red herring” here is that there is no murder mystery at all. It’s a fake-out.

Annette Bening plays Joy Delaney, the matriarch of a tennis family, who goes missing early on in this series. In the present, her four adult children (along with the cops) try to uncover the mystery of her disappearance while flashbacks fill us in on the story leading up to it. The story essentially begins when a woman named Savannah (Georgia Flood) shows up at the home of Joy and her husband, Stan (Sam Neill), claiming that she is fleeing an abusive boyfriend. They take her in, and over the ensuing weeks, Joy grows increasingly close to Savannah because she provides Joy with something her kids do not: Appreciation.

The four kids are Troy (Jake Lacy), a wealthy businessman who is having an affair with his boss’s much older wife; Amy (Alison Brie), the least accomplished sibling who has a love-hate relationship with her roommate; Logan (Conor Merrigan Turner), who works on the marina and is contemplating leaving Miami to move to Seattle with his girlfriend; and Brooke (Essie Randles), a struggling orthopedist who is going through difficulties with her girlfriend.

They all also have dysfunctional relationships with their parents, particularly their grouchy father, and that dysfunction largely stems from the time Stan — a tennis coach — lost his best student, Harry Haddad, who would go on to become a successful professional tennis player and leave a wake of bitterness and resentment behind in the Delaney household.

That’s the family drama side of things. Here’s where the murder mystery comes in: There are two suspects in the disappearance of Joy from the outset: Savannah, the stranger who moved in with them, and Stan, with whom Joy was experiencing marital difficulties. Over the course of six episodes, a number of clues suggest that Stan has murdered his wife: Over the first few days, he insists she’s fine and just taking a nap whenever someone asks where she is; he has a large unexplained gash over his eye; Joy’s bicycle, covered in blood, is found abandoned; a bloody sweater is found buried in a nearby yard; her phone is left behind in a laundry basket; and, most damning of all, Stan is seen loading a large bag onto a boat with the intention of dumping it in the ocean. Oh, and a podcast that Stan is recording captures what sounds like a violent struggle between Joy and Stan.

Eleven days go by, and as the clues continue to mount, the children are increasingly convinced that their father killed their mother. Despite his protests, all the clues certainly suggest as much, and Stan is eventually arrested, jailed, and charged with murder.

Spoiler, again: Joy is not dead. We learn in the final episode that, 11 days prior, Joy hit a pothole on her bike and bloodied her knee; she wrapped her sweater around her bloody knee, walked home, left the bloody sweater on the driveway, and a dog picked it up and buried it in a nearby yard; and she got into an argument with Stan and, while there was no physical violence, Stan did throw around a few things captured by his podcast mic. Frustrated with Stan, Joy threw her phone in her laundry basket, left the house, used a payphone to call the stranger, Savannah — who, it turns out, is a grifter — and went with her to her cabin in the mountains to hide out for a few days. She decides to take a break from her family and not let them know. Meanwhile, Stan packs a bunch of tennis trophies — a source of conflict in their marriage — into a large bag and dumps them into the ocean in the hopes that it will help resolve their marital difficulties. Caught on camera, police (and the Delaney siblings) mistake the bag of trophies for a bag of Joy’s body parts.

So, no: There is no murder. Joy is fine, although the grifter, Savannah, nearly kills her when they get into a car accident. Savannah, as it turns out, is also the sister of Harry Haddid, the professional tennis player, and she sought to destroy the Delaney family the way that the Delaneys had destroyed her family when Harry fired Stan as his tennis coach.

I love a good family drama. I love a good murder mystery. The problem with Apples Never Fall is that Moriarty refuses to pick a lane and uses the possibility of murder to inform the family drama, which might be OK if she didn’t also drop clues throughout pointing toward Stan as the killer and ultimately explain away a bunch of coincidences with a wildly improbable set of events meant to double as an innocent explanation. It’s annoying. Don’t piss down my leg and tell me it’s a murder mystery when it was about daddy issues all along.