Brand New Cherry Flavor

It's as ambitious as anything Netflix has produced this year. Held together by an incredible performance by Rosa Salazar, it’s not a show in which everything "works," but it’s also quickly easy to forgive its missteps because it’s clearly the product of a showrunner willing to take risks. ... Recalling everything from “Wild Palms” to “Lost Highway,” “Brand New Cherry Flavor” will be far too strange for a lot of Netflix subscribers—this is a good thing.

The tone here is David Lynch meets David Cronenberg meets Quentin Tarantino, moody and heightened in the early episodes, then ever more weird and gory. It all hinges on Salazar and treatises may be written on her huge, expressive eyes, which jump between angered, exhausted, erotic and (repeatedly) horrified.

Yep, this show is bonkers. But Salazar sets a down-to-Earth tone that gives it ballast. “Cherry’s” noir-tinged presentation of Southern California in the ’90s feels authentic in its nihilism, too.

In another show, Lisa might have been the naïve victim in a cautionary tale about what can happen in the pursuit of power. Instead, as the series brings her own transgressions into focus, she remains bracingly imperfect, an anchor for the deep and hopeless pessimism that Brand New Cherry Flavor clearly and forcefully articulate.

For those who don’t mind the loopy, meandering not-quite-real-ness of it all, Cherry Flavor makes for an engagingly offbeat affair. And no, that title is never once explained nor justified.