Alison Brie is illuminating as the free-wheeling, high-strung mess Amy Delaney in Peacock’s TV version of Liane Moriarty’s popular novel Apples Never Fall. The story is so compelling not only because it is about a missing mother and a father who is the main suspect, but because the Delaney family also have four children who align in different ways and take sides when their mother disappears. Which is what makes the ending so compelling, juicy, and –dare I say it? – upsetting for some critics.
CinemaBlend recently spoke with Brie about the TV series from the author of Big Little Lies, Nine Perfect Strangers and more. Of course, Apples Never Fall makes some big changes from the book, and that includes taking creative license with the ending. If you’ve caught the show with your Peacock subscription, you may already be aware of some of the differences, but I will be getting into some spoilers below. But first, how does the actress feel about it?
I was really excited reading the ending of the show, and a bit surprised. We veer a little bit from the ending in the book, which I actually think is exciting. So readers of the book have something new to experience in watching the show. And as you said, this show really is about secrets coming to light. And the final episodes are no different. If anything, it's, you know, an amped up version of sort of that thing that you've been seeing the whole time, and what's gonna happen to this family. So I was really excited about it.
While Alison Brie claims the show manages to “veer a little bit” from Moriarty’s original ending, there are actually 2 major changes from the books I think are worth pointing out.
- The setting for Joy's "escape" is different and eerier.
- The messed up twist at the end of the book is left vague in order to focus on a Delaney reunion.
In Moriarty's version, matriarch Joy ultimately decided she needed a break from the Delaneys and headed with Savannah to a retreat where cell phone use was not allowed, thus allowing her children (and the police) to think she disappeared. She eventually returned home, but in the meantime, we'd learned more about Savannah. She’d suffered abuse under her mother while her tennis star brother left her behind, and had lately become her mother’s abuser, locking her up with limited food and water during the time she’d been with Joy and co.
That’s the real twist of the book. It wasn’t really about Joy’s disappearance, but about what Savannah was hiding after all. Interestingly, this is muted in the series to focus much more on the Delaney bent, which is the "something new" Brie commented on that readers are able to experience.
The streaming subscription version swapped a retreat for a Georgia home Savannah allegedly owned in which she cut the phone lines after getting Joy, who is played by Anette Bening in a TV first, to come for a visit following her fight with Stan (which led to the bicycle accident and the bloody jacket).
The second change came after Joy decided to go home. Savannah and Joy getting in a care accident could have led to a very different ending to this series, but instead, Joy simply returned home to remark on the “mess” the hurricane has caused on the family’s backyard tennis court. Joy came to realize Savannah was tennis protege Harry Haddad's sister who was abused, but when Savannah exited the show, her own secrets were left vaguer than what we get in the book.
As Alison Brie noted while speaking to us: "this show really is about secrets coming to light," and while some of that had to do with Savannah's secrets, I'm happy the show ending came with some closure for the Delaneys. The series is not about the culmination of Joy disappearing, it's more about using Joy's disappearance to confront a lot of familial issues the family thought they had buried but had kept bubbling up to the surface in myriad ways.
Once Joy got home, there was still work to be done, but all in all, I found this ending more satisfying than the book, though if you go into this one thinking it's simply a murder mystery, you're definitely going to get more than you'd bargained for.
Apples Never Fall is currently streaming on the 2024 TV schedule over at Peacock.
