#Lovepedal stir of echoes review series#

#Lovepedal stir of echoes review series#

(The Australian-produced series was filmed in Wilmington, North Carolina, which believably stands in for Virginia). As adults, they switch every year on their birthdays the “Gina” we meet is actually Leni, desperate to find “Leni” (Gina) and playing both roles in the meantime in Mt Echo. It’s impossible to describe the rest of the show without this so, spoiler alert, although it’s in the official synopsis (if not the trailer): since they were children, Leni and Gina have occasionally switched places, pretending to be each other and thus experiencing both lives (and romantic partners and, eventually, Leni’s daughter Mattie). That is despite a twist at the end of the first episode which is supposed to upend expectations and scramble the brain but ends up just feeling silly. It commits one of the true sins of peak TV, which is to be boring. Echoes reaches for all of these, yet struggles to capture a real feeling, its mysteries hollow, its deceptions shallow, and its various tones at best out of rhythm. Created by Australian writer-director Vanessa Gazy, Echoes is both ridiculous and cheap-looking, neither of which is a crime if you can deliver on at least one dramatic hook – suspense, creepiness, a suspicious backstory, a haunting, envy, sex. Unfortunately, little of the tension you could infer from this description makes it to the screen in this seven-episode series, which has some wild gesticulations but featherweight emotional heft.

But they’re most devoted to each other, uploading their daily private lives into a shared virtual diary until the day Leni disappears in a suspected burglary, pulling Gina back to Mt Echo. Both are married to handsome men – Gina to Charlie (Daniel Sunjata), Leni to wrangler Jack (Matt Bomer). Gina is a bestselling writer who lives in an airy LA mansion and drives a Tesla, Leni runs a horse farm in their rural home town of Mt Echo, Virginia.