“Disclaimer” pulls the rug out from the audience before they’ve had the chance to get settled. There’s no building of empathy for its central character, Cate Blanchett’s Catherine Ravenscroft. There’s no luxuriating in her banal every day, at work or in her plush London home with her snobbish husband (Sacha Baron Cohen) and directionless, resentful adult son (Kodi Smit-McPhee).
All we know at the beginning of the seven-part series, which begins rolling out on Apple TV+ Friday, is that she’s an acclaimed documentary filmmaker who is being feted by Christiane Amanpour. But almost immediately her life starts to spiral when she receives an anonymous, self-published book about a young mother on vacation in Italy with her toddler son that’s shockingly familiar. The woman in the book meets a young man who later drowns while trying to save her son.
When the police question her, she denies knowing him and returns to London. It’s a memory that Catherine has long kept buried and secret but has now emerged in spectacularly embarrassing, reputation-destroying fashion along with a batch of intimate, provocative photos that the young man, Jonathan (Louis Partridge) took the night before. “Disclaimer” throws you into the fire; And like everyone else in the show, from strangers reading the book to Catherine’s husband, you start making assumptions about and judging her.
Not even Blanchett was immune reading the script. She wondered: Is this woman awful? “I was shocked.