‘Before’ Is Exactly the Kind of Self-Serious Project Billy Crystal Used to Mock

When Billy Crystal regularly hosted the Academy Awards, he liked to begin the show with a montage where he was inserted into the nominated films. The 2000 opening leaned more on Hollywood history, with Crystal appearing in vintage films like The Graduate and Psycho. There were still jokes about that year’s movies, though, like when a Charlie Chaplin homage included a title card where Crystal quoted the most famous line from The Sixth Sense: “I see dead people.” Crystal later had some more fun with the M. Night Shyamalan sensation with a song parody, set to the tune of “People” from Funny Girl, which included the joke, “You see things that ain’t there, like Bruce Willis with hair.”

I bring this up because Crystal’s new Apple TV+ miniseries Before often feels like Crystal decided it was time to put himself into a much longer Sixth Sense riff — only one that is improbably meant to be taken seriously. Corny as some of his Oscar gags could be, they would still be vastly preferable to what he’s doing in this tedious misfire.

Crystal plays Eli, a therapist still grieving the death of his wife Lynn (Judith Light), who committed suicide when her cancer treatments failed. When lured out of semi-retirement to treat troubled foster child Noah (Jacobi Jupe), he is shocked to realize that the boy’s various hallucinations and fugue states keep crossing over into aspects of Eli’s own past. With growing skepticism from Noah’s foster mother Denise (Rosie Perez), his attorney Gail (Sakina Jaffrey), and hospital psychiatrist Jane (Hope Davis), Eli sets on an unorthodox, at times outright dangerous course of treatment that soon seems to be less about Noah and more about Eli working through his feelings about Lynn.

Created by Sarah Thorp, Before is somehow the third Apple show this month to portray a widower going through a recklessly unconventional grieving process. But Shrinking is primarily a comedy, and Disclaimer has a couple of acting heavyweights in Kevin Kline and Cate Blanchett to anchor its melodramatic revenge plot. Before is filled with nightmarish imagery — worms crawling around under people’s skin, black ooze descending from ceilings, children cracking their heads on ice and sinking into dark depths — that are meant to make you question whether Noah is battling mental illness or supernatural forces. But even with the fanciful visuals, the show is relentlessly dour, but without the dramatic chops to support this approach.
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Though Crystal is primarily known and loved for his facility with slinging jokes, he’s acquitted himself quite well at times when asked to play things straight. He’s a convincingly sincere romantic lead in When Harry Met Sally, for instance, and he’s even credible as an action hero who says things like “If you hurt that lady, you’ll never be dead enough” in the underrated Eighties buddy cop film Running Scared. But those heavier moments work as accent on primarily comedic performances, rather than as the whole thing. At one point, Eli tells his own shrink, “My life has turned into a Dali painting!” On paper, it’s the kind of quip you could imagine coming out of the mouth of Mitch from City Slickers; here, though, it’s not meant as a punchline, but the latest example of a fragile old man afraid that he’s losing his grip on reality. 

It’s not a bad performance, necessarily — Crystal is believable enough in portraying Eli’s professional skills and emotional vulnerabilities. It just doesn’t have nearly enough gravity or charisma to compensate for the dull, repetitive, unintentionally silly story. Like too many modern streaming shows, Before plays like a movie that got expanded to suit the needs of the interested buyer. Even a feature-length version of this plot would likely struggle with its lack of ideas, but 10 half-hour episodes feel punishing, well before a finale that offers an uninteresting explanation of the main mystery, and can’t even be bothered to resolve several other running plot threads.
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One episode flashes back to how Eli and Lynn met, with digital effects briefly turning Crystal and Light back into their Nineties selves. Had this been an actual movie made in that era, odds are greater that the younger Crystal would have made fun of it in an Oscar monologue than star in it.

The first two episodes of Before begin streaming October 25 on Apple TV+, with additional episodes releasing weekly. I’ve seen all 10.