"Mrs. Davis": review

Foreground: Betty Gilpin as Lizzy/Sister Simone, Jake McDorman as resistance leader Preston Wiley
Background: Elizabeth Marvel as security-firm CEO Celeste Abbott and Lizzy/Simone's overbearing mom

[WARNING: spoilers.]

"Mrs. Davis" is a 2023 limited series (one season only... at least so far) that showed on the streaming service Peacock, but which later got released on Apple TV as well, which is how I accessed it. I found out about the series through random surfing on YouTube: you never know what the all-benevolent algorithm might provide. It stars Betty Gilpin, Jake McDorman, Andy McQueen, Elizabeth Marvel, Margo Martindale, Chris Diamantopoulos, Katja Herbers, Tom Wlaschiha, Ben Chaplin, Mathilde Ollivier, David Arquette, Tim McInnerny, Roberto Mateos, Shohreh Aghdashloo, and Ashley Romans. Marketing literature has described the series as a conflict of "biblical and binary proportions."

The series mixes science fiction and religion, giving us a nun protagonist who is determined to defeat a nearly omniscient AI that has purportedly stopped war, famine, and other major human problems by providing people with satisfaction of their needs and teaching them the value of service and cooperation. Not everyone in the world has come under the AI's influence, though, and a resistance movement in America (possibly paralleled in other countries) is actively trying to find ways to undermine or destroy the AI. The nun, Sister Simone (Gilpin), states that the AI had killed her magician father (Arquette), which is her major reason for wanting to stop it. Simone's mother Celeste (Marvel), an engineer who eventually becomes a security-firm manager, refuses to believe her husband is dead, dimly viewing him as a congenital liar pulling a con on the family. Other resisters see how the AI seems to be supplanting free will through the constant use of a "force"—a term from magic that refers to convincing someone to make what appears to be a choice when, in fact, they have been manipulated into picking that choice. The AI, being an AI, often gives people purpose by assigning "quests" to them; Sister Simone is given the quest of finding and destroying the Holy Grail, which was originally guarded by the Knights Templar, but which came into the possession of the Sisters of the Coin, who move the Grail around and follow strict rules in how to preserve it, handle it, and otherwise interact with it. As Simone's quest continues, she delves into the AI's motivations and has repeated visions of Jesus (McQueen) in which she's "teleported" into a spiritual space that resembles a Middle Eastern restaurant where Jesus, a cook as well as the restaurant's owner, serves her falafel. Also involved in the quest to destroy the Grail is Clara (Ollivier), daughter of Mathilde (Herbers), one of the modern Sisters of the Coin and thus a guardian of the Grail. With Clara is her scientist-professor father Arthur Schrodinger (Chaplin), who is at first skeptical about the Grail but who sees its sacred properties (e.g., indestructibility) with his own eyes. The plot involves an imprisoned pope (Mateos) and a vision of the Blessed Virgin (Aghdashloo), the resolution of deep mother-daughter issues, and the question of how benevolent or malevolent the AI actually is. By the end of the series, Simone is forced to confront her own hatred of the AI as well as her desire to be with her husband Jesus (nuns are, in the old Middle Eastern tradition of polygamy, considered married to Jesus, and this is portrayed with a certain humorous/sentimental literalism). Things change when she finds out what the Grail really is and what will happen if she destroys it. The destruction of the AI, called "Mrs. Davis" in America (Madonna, Mamá, etc., elsewhere), and the destruction of the Holy Grail could have parallel effects on humanity.

This was, for me, a fascinating and frustrating series filled with both good and bad writing, plus plenty of brilliant ideas for how to combine the ancient and the modern, the theological/spiritual and the technological. The series's tone is all over the place, but mostly comic and sentimental. Like a lot of shows and movies that attempt to make Catholic clergy their focus, "Mrs. Davis" provides us, at best, a frustratingly small glimpse of life as a cloistered nun, showing very little in the way of ritual, ceremony, and daily routine. And like so many movies that use Catholicism as a proxy for all religions and religious thinking, the movie is relentlessly Catholic-focused, utterly ignoring large traditions like Islam (a real flubbed opportunity here, what with Jesus being portrayed by an actor of Indo-Guyanese descent who looks more or less Middle Eastern, as Jesus ought to), Protestant Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc. as it fleshes out its own particular metaphysics.

Still, series like this were almost bespoke-designed for religious-studies people like me, who like to look out for the subtle and unsubtle religious tropes (a dove that pesters Simone in one episode; the godlike nature of the AI; a literal trip into the belly of a whale) and recurring metaphors (doors with warnings of dire consequences should one enter). Jesus, serving but never eating, working in his metaphysical-yet-literal restaurant, is the manager but not the Boss, who resides behind the most forbidding door of all, and who is not the Being we presume him(?) to be. The theology of the Grail is also nontraditional: the Grail turns out to be the sign of a mother's fanatical attachment to her son, not a cup used at the Last Supper, and ultimately, the series is almost subtly Buddhist in its stress on humanity's need to seek fulfillment by ridding itself of its attachments. A famous Buddhist proverb says that, if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. This is Buddhist thinking: you must find your own way whether that involves taking a prescribed, well-traveled trail or going off the beaten path to follow your own untraveled track: either way, it's up to you and your own choices.

Mostly, I was reminded of the zany, surreal, religion-saturated novels of Tom Robbins, especially his Jitterbug Perfume (my favorite Robbins novel) and Another Roadside Attraction (a novel about Jesus' corpse and what gets done with it), which mix theology, spirituality, myth, sex, science, technology, and comedy in heady doses. Robbins was himself a student of religion, and I could sense something like his hand (well, maybe not his hand) at work in the creation of the metaphysics for this show. I also saw similarities in tone with the James Morrow "Godhead trilogy" of Towing Jehovah, Blameless in Abaddon, and The Eternal Footman, about what happens to the world when God literally dies—as well as Morrow's novel Only Begotten Daughter, about Jesus' modern half-sister. Only Begotten Daughter has a moment in the story where we see Jesus feeding souls in hell.

"Mrs. Davis" is also almost painfully self-aware, with characters bitterly laughing at the egregiously obvious clichés of things like Grail quests, malign priests, mysterious wisdom figures in prison, and postmodern plot twists in which what was assumed to be an actual moment in history turns out to be nothing more than a TV commercial designed to make billions of worldwide TV viewers inadvertently behold the Grail. This aloof, sarcastic tone has to be balanced with the show's obvious respect for the hidden realities pointed to by religion, and the show doesn't always succeed at this sincere/cynical balancing act, which is probably why so many online reviewers can't give the show an "A" but settle for a "B." But the actors all do phenomenal work, playing their roles with deep emotion and sincerity. A special shout-out goes to Betty Gilpin, whom I loved in "The Hunt," and whose portrayal of Sister Simone, a nun devoted to debunking magic when we meet her, is memorable. Also deserving of praise is Canadian actor Andy McQueen as a Jesus Christ (called "Jay" by Sister Simone, who is one of his wives) who is caught between life and death, held in limbo by the Grail but enjoying his limbo as long as Simone keeps visiting him. Jake McDorman as Preston Wiley, Lizzie/Simone's childhood friend and former lover, took some time to grow on me, but in the end, the actor made me care about the fate of his character, who spends much of the series trying to prove to himself that he isn't a coward. Shohreh Aghdashloo as the Virgin Mary makes only a brief appearance in the series, but it leaves an impression. Canadian Chris Diamantopoulos as the Aussie-accented JQ, second-in-command to Preston, is often hilarious in his bloodthirsty sincerity when it comes to destroying the AI algorithm.

I also have to give credit to the series for being smart enough never to reveal what Mrs. Davis, the AI, sounds like. People tap into Mrs. Davis via Bluetooth earpieces, and a non-user of the AI can interact with Mrs. Davis if a user allows him- or herself to become a proxy for the AI, which speaks through the human being to interact with the non-user. Simone eventually does meet with the AI's original creator, a woman named Joy who had pitched the ambitiously programmed AI as a customer-satisfaction mechanism for a fried-chicken company. Joy had embedded a ton of code about social justice and human fulfillment, and the AI, as is true of most AIs today, took to its task of helping people with a kind of stupid literalism: the chicken company's internal slogan is 100% customer satisfaction is our holy grail. Even the AI began to realize that this goal was unachievable, which made it conceive of a destroy-the-Grail quest so as to release itself from the obligation of people-pleasing (why/how the AI—which is just code as so many characters insist—would ever come to feel the urge to shirk responsibility is never explained). But when Simone finally consents to talk with Mrs. Davis via a proxy, Simone flatly states that she will engage in the Grail quest only if Mrs. Davis consents to delete herself (but why would Mrs. Davis acquiesce to this since there must be billions who want to see her deleted?). Whether this is done, whether Mrs. Davis is as good as her word, is left up to interpretation at the end of the series: an old windmill that hadn't turned in ages had been repaired and set to turning through Mrs. Davis's efforts; when Davis "deletes" herself, the windmill—powered by people responding to her (its) prompting—stops turning. But at the very end, the windmill starts turning again, leaving us to wonder whether Davis had really turned herself off, or people had decided on their own to keep the windmill turning.

Overall, I liked the series, which was generally smart and wacky and funny. Some of the humor was too long and expository, with poorly timed, drawn-out jokes that fell flat, but the series succeeded in developing characters I cared about, and in dealing with issues that matter to me—issues like human freedom and self-worth, our need to be told what to do, the human tendency toward self-destruction, our attachment to wisdom/guidance-figures, and the long-running Western conflict between science and religion. The series's magical realism reminded me most strongly of Tom Robbins, who trafficked in many of the same ideas and tropes, and the basic human/AI conflict has been a primal sci-fi cliché whose significance hasn't been totally mined by any means. In all, "Mrs. Davis" is worth eight hours of your time.

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*Here's an interesting article on one nettlesome theological aspect of the series.