Mrs. Davis: A Wacky Parable About Belief, Faith and False Gods

Mrs. Davis is self-consciously the oddest show out there right now. Co-created and run by Damon Lindelof and former The Big Bang Theory writer Tara Hernandez, It takes place in a twenty-minutes-from-now world where an AI with the maternal-sounding name Mrs. Davis has quietly, benignly taken over the world. People listen to “her” via their phones, happily obeying her when she tells them what to do. It makes them happy and gives them purpose. A nun named Simone (Betty Gilpin) is vehemently opposed to Mrs. Davis, so the AI sends her on a quest: to find and destroy the Holy Grail and in return, Mrs. Davis will shut down forever, freeing the world from her influence, but does the world really want to be free of “her”?

Simone embarks on a wild and surreal journey across the world on her quest, reuniting with her childhood sweetheart Wiley (Jake McDornan), now part of a cult of hyper-masculinity who has his own reasons for wanting the destruction of Mrs. Davis. Most thrillers about powerful AI are self-serious and pompous affairs, but Mrs. Davis is willfully, gleefully ridiculous and wacky, almost smug in its unapologetically farcical wackiness with silly, wacky characters who think they’re mythical heroes when they’re frequently flawed, broken people. It feels like a show written from rampant and drunken Google searches, full of obscure and arcane knowledge that you can turn up if you know to search for esoteric knowledge.

Mrs. Davis is Full of Lindelof’s Big Recurring Theme

The grand theme of Mrs. Davis is about finding something or someone to put one’s faith in. Every character believes in something or is in search of something to believe in. That’s why Lindelof and Hernandez made their heroine a nun, a figure who symbolizes faith. While virtually the rest of the world believes in Mrs. Davis as a God who tells them what to do, Simone has chosen to believe literally in Jesus (Andy McQueen) in the form of literally visiting him in that ethereal headspace where he runs a falafel restaurant. Her mother, Celeste (Elizabeth Marvel), chooses to believe in the uncompromising self-sufficiency espoused by Ayn Rand. Her father believes in the cathartic power of magic tricks. Wiley is searching for a masculine identity he can believe in. JD (Chris Diamantopoulos) and his followers choose to believe in a cartoonish cult of hypermasculinity. Mathilde LaFleur (Katja Herbers) and her fellow followers are true believers in Christ as they protect the Holy Grail, even sending an increasingly resentful agent  (Tom Wlashina) to get ordained as a priest in the Vatican so he can be their mole while he bristles at pretending at dogmas he doesn’t believe in.

Faith is a recurring theme in Lindelof’s work. Lost was about people finding a side to believe in. The Leftovers was about people searching for faith in a world left behind by God. Lindelof’s Watchmen was also about the search for a new God to believe in. Much of Hernandez’s work on The Big Bang Theory is about a group of nerds and how their deep beliefs clash with the world outside their circle. Mrs. Davis is the type of show one of the characters on The Big Bang Theory would write if they ever became a TV writer… or a new show from a writer of The Big Bang Theory.

Some people have said Mrs. Davis is the type of crazy show an AI might write, but that is incorrect. If an AI had written this show, it would be completely incoherent word vomit. It takes crazy, flawed, fallible humans to write a show like this and still make sense, but that’s a discussion for another time.

Mrs. Davis is streaming on Peacock.