Angelyne premieres on Peacock on May 19, 2022.
If you’ve been to Los Angeles at any point between 1984 and the present day, and visited the tourist hot spots, there’s a good chance you’ve seen the buxom blonde image of Angelyne gracing a massive billboard or random wall, or even the woman herself toodling around in her pink Corvette. Peacock’s limited series Angelyne attempts to pull back the pancake makeup on the woman who fashioned herself into the de facto mascot of the city. Unlike many other biographical series, this one takes an entertainingly wonky approach that ends up capturing the spirit of its subject perfectly. Her story unfolds in myriad ways from faux documentary confessionals to “he said/she said” scenarios of past events, with even some magical realism sprinkled throughout. The frothy mix of storytelling allows for quite a bit of Angelyne’s mystique to remain intact, while presenting just enough actual history to give the whole endeavor some substance.
A big part of why the series works is Emmy Rossum (Shameless), who does double-duty on the limited series as both an executive producer with her partner Sam Esmail (Mr. Robot) and playing the titular icon. She’s sparkly, sassy, and entirely committed to making Angelyne more than her measurements. And the non-linear format of the series gives Rossum a broad canvas to convincingly play Angelyne from the tender age of 17 all the way through to current day, in her 70s. The makeup team has some pretty good success in transforming Rossum via prosthetics and heavy makeup into the larger-than-life persona of Angelyne. However, aging makeup and wigs on the male characters don’t come off half as well. Gratefully, Rossum’s performance is never drowned by all the external artifice. From the plastic surgery boobs spilling from her costumes to the signature coo that caps many of Angelyne’s sentences, Rossum works all of the most garish elements of the woman into a rather charming whole.
Loosely based on a 2017 The Hollywood Reporter expose on the real Angelyne, showrunner Allison Miller uses the undisputed facts of her life from that story to frame the series into a quasi-documentary. The cast members play key figures in Angelyne’s life (just with changed names), and each speaks into the camera sharing their “truths” and experiences living in the mercurial woman’s orbit. From her bandmate/ex-boyfriend to her personal assistant and even the writer of the magazine feature, every one chimes in to try to shed some light on the Angelyne they “know.” And each and every one of them, including Angelyne, are quickly revealed to be unreliable narrators, which the writers use to create some very funny “he said/she said” sequences that break traditional biopic storytelling conventions. Scenes from her life get stopped in mid action as Angelyne disputes someone’s version of events, or she might break into a sequence with a first-person refutation, course correcting what she’s not comfortable sharing with the world.
At first, those breaks from reality are a bit odd to navigate but then the genius of the format becomes apparent. Angelyne’s dedication to harnessing the power of her own story, and herding it into territory that she can control, is exactly how the woman meticulously curated the enigmatic fantasy that became her persona. By letting her inject herself into this telling of her story, we get a taste of how much she’s controlled her narrative for decades. Angelyne may have projected herself as a bimbo, but the series makes it clear that was a trashy smokescreen to obscure the dogged machinations she pursued to achieve her dream of becoming famous. The mistakes of her idol, Marilyn Monroe, were not lost on Angelyne and there’s plenty to admire in her vision of figuring how to make a city with perpetual ADHD focus on her.
The first three episodes, “Dream Machine,” “Gods and Fairies,” and “Glow in the Dark Queen of the Universe,” drill down into the “how” of making her ambitions real. From her late teens forward, we get to see how Angelyne figured out how to heavily nudge the most pliable people towards fulfilling her wants and needs. With her platinum hair, kitten voice, and New Age ideals, Angelyne manifested herself into a living, breathing Barbie doll. And perhaps her greatest trick is that she wielded her sex appeal to beguile, manipulate, and confuse many, but, according to this telling, never overtly traded in sexual favors as most assume. In fact, there’s almost an asexual nature to how the series shows her navigating her closest relationships, with even emotional affairs having an almost innocent quality to them.
The last two episodes, “The Tease” and “Pink Clouds,” are the best of the series as they go about separating the myth from the fiction. They focus on Max (Lukas Gage), a naive young documentarian who gets her approval to tell her life story. He quickly becomes frustrated and goes broke when she refuses to actually share anything of note about her life. It all devolves into an arbitration stalemate but his investigations inform the eventual The Hollywood Reporter piece, which in turn forces the fairy tale and the facts to finally collide. Rossum again rises to the occasion, shedding the glitz and camp to tell the stripped-down origin story. Enough blanks get filled in so that we can finally understand why Angelyne was born, and needed to exist. And the production takes great care to make sure the truth doesn’t diminish the fantasy. In fact, in the end, it celebrates the persona in an ingenious way. You’re left laughing and admiring her singular dedication to the Hollywood story that she crafted for herself, and willed into existence.