In the Flesh: Brand New Cherry Flavor

Disclaimer: One of Brand New Cherry Flavor’s three principal writers, Matt Fennell, is a friend of mine, though I didn’t know he’d worked on it until after I’d watched it

Drawing inspiration from sources as diverse as Lost Highway, Under the Skin, and Videodrome, Nick Antosca and Lenore Zion’s Brand New Cherry Flavor stirs its source material into a milkshake as sweet and addictive as its title suggests. A nine hundred-year-old bodysnatching witch, Boro (Catherie Keener), toys with Lisa (Rosa Salazar), an intense young filmmaker whose passion project is stolen by unscrupulous and struggling producer Lou Burke (Eric Lange) after she rebuffs his aggressive advances. It’s all wrapped up in the dusty, dilapidated LA of the 1990s, a landscape of abandoned buildings, peeling wallpaper, payphones, and graffiti. Deliciously repellent practical effects bring gooey, dripping life to spectacles like Lisa vomiting up a newborn kitten and, later, the formation of a Cronenbergian birth canal and vaginal orifice in her side, complete with its own secretions and clitoral lobe. The show’s set dressing is just as inspired, melding deep jungle malaise and suburban decay to create locations at once primal and lifeless.

But if Brand New Cherry Flavor is a catalog of juicy horrors, it’s also full of moments of gonzo tenderness. Lou, heartbroken by his son’s transformation into a brain-dead zombie, recalls a slightly awkward night out they shared with frail and palpable yearning. Moviestar Roy Hardaway (Jeff Ward) fists the neovaginal sex organ in Lisa’s side with a combination of delicate wonder and animal arousal. Perhaps most touching is Zelda’s (Skylar Radzion) unswerving love for her boyfriend Jules (Jayson Blair) after he catches fire at a party, his body covered in second and third-degree burns. “They made him new lips out of his thigh muscles!” she squeals excitedly to Lisa in one scene. “Soon we’re gonna be able to kiss again!” We first meet Zelda with her face wrapped in a Goodnight Mommy-esque mask of post-plastic surgery bandages, and her indifference to what many would consider the “destruction” of Jules’s appearance suggests an attitude toward body modification more removed and practical than self-obsessed, a refreshing change of pace to stodgy cultural attitudes on the subject.

At no point does Antosca and Zion’s show sit its viewers down to spell out everything it’s doing, choosing instead to build its characters organically (Boro’s evasive verbal sparring, Lou’s tortured metaphors, Lisa’s tight, tense body language) and its themes by inference. The obsessive pursuit of directorship of a film at the cost of human life. A trail of dead and empty bodies left behind across the centuries in service to an oddball parasite’s desire to keep playing games and trading gossip. There’s no existential threat here, no fate of the world shit, just people on the margins of the entertainment industry ripping into each other, loving each other, fucking up and hurting and maybe getting it right next time, or at least a little less wrong. For all that it resembles Antosca’s previous series Channel Zero so closely, Brand New Cherry Flavor is its own animal, shaggy and weird and unpredictable. I can’t wait for more.