Renee Zellweger Holds Court in Netflix's Soapy Series What/If

“What/If” begins with a monologue. To whom is this mysterious, sharp-edged blonde speaking, you might wonder, as she opines about fate and self-actualization, morality and power, risk and reward. She stares out an elegant floor-to-ceiling window, wanders past a huge ring of gold keys ensconced in a glowing glass display case, pauses to absently snip a bonsai tree, her speech heating up all the time. And you sit there, waiting for the reveal: A dead body in a chair by the fireplace. Or a man held hostage, gagged and bound. Or a smiling co-conspirator. When the reveal comes, it’s comically underwhelming. She has an audience of one, alright, but it’s just her and a voice recorder; she’s improvising a chapter of her latest book, the title of which she conveniently scribbles on a piece of luxe stationery right as her menacing treatise reaches its climax. It’s underlined for emphasis: “At. Any. Cost.”

That monologue is a microcosm of the first season of “What/If,” the new Netflix anthology series from “Revenge” creator Mike Kelley (premiering with 10 episodes on Friday). It's over-the-top and oddly anticlimactic in one. "What/If" plays at teasing out big philosophical and moral questions, but instead just drops thematically appropriate words at random like a college poetry student checking off all the requirements in a writing prompt. Just when you start to get bored, it tosses in something like that bonsai tree, ridiculous and arch. And above all, that monologue, like the series, benefits from the presence of Renee Zellweger, vamping her way through one of those “strong female leads” that feels as though it was written for a man before someone went in and changed all the pronouns, and somehow making it sing. When Zellweger’s not on screen, “What/If” is a mostly empty, broad strokes neo-noir soap, frothy and forgettable. When she appears, it’s still all of those things—but dear lord, please pass the popcorn.

Zellweger plays Anne Montgomery, a mysterious venture capitalist and financial guru—think Sheryl Sandberg meets Suze Orman, if those two people moved and spoke like a femme fatale from American noir but theorized like Ayn Rand. Circumstantially, that’s the portrait, but dramatically, she owes more to Robert Redford’s John Gage from "Indecent Proposal," a major influence on this first season (though here, love seems to play no part of the equation). For reasons left intentionally unclear, she sets her financial sights on Lisa Donovan (Jane Levy, playing a protagonist to whom things simply happen), who runs a flailing but innovative medical company called Emigen, which aims to help people with curable but serious illnesses for whom traditional treatments have proven ineffective. The conditions for Anne’s swooping in and saving the day: A night with Lisa’s husband Sean (Blake Jenner), and a clause in the contract prohibiting the couple from ever discussing what happens in the course of that night.

From a storytelling perspective, the most interesting aspect of “What/If” is that last bit: The idea that the events of the evening matter less than the couple’s inability to discuss them. For a while, that remains true, and Kelley and company find ways to echo that idea in the subplots centered on the many people in Lisa and Sean’s lives (a brother struggling with his identity as a queer man and his patient partner, a woman struggling with a workplace affair and her oblivious husband, two of Lisa’s colleagues who become independently wary of Anne’s machinations). But “What/If” comes apart the moment you start to really consider the ideas, and the series is much more interested in plot (and, rightly, in Zellweger holding court) than it is in character or theme. Instead of letting what’s unsaid fester and drive the couple apart, it simply tells us that the marriage is now in jeopardy, and everybody broods.