‘Apples Never Fall’ Review: A Drama Wrapped in a Mystery Inside a Formula

“Apples Never Fall,” premiering Thursday on Peacock, is the third Liane Moriarty book to be adapted for television, following HBO’s “Big Little Lies” and Hulu’s “Nine Perfect Strangers.” But if you told me it was the 10th, I’d believe you, given how familiar it all feels. The seven-episode mini-series is so well-oiled and unsurprising, it just glides on by.

Annette Bening and Sam Neill star as Joy and Stan Delaney, pillars of West Palm Beach, Fla., who are, as the central couples in these kinds of shows always are, seemingly perfect but secretly damaged. They’ve just sold their tennis academy and are balking at the alleged freedoms of retirement, which Joy thought she’d spend with her four adult children.

However, the kids don’t want to hang out with their hovering mom and volatile, bitter dad; they want to have their own lives of not-very-quiet desperation. Troy (Jake Lacy) is the clenched-jaw rich brother, at the tail end of a divorce from a woman everyone else really liked. Amy (Alison Brie) is the “searcher,” as her mother puts it, an aspiring life coach who would be perfectly at home on any show set in California. Logan (Conor Merrigan Turner) wants to be beachy, not sporty, so he works at a marina and does yoga. Brooke (Essie Randles) is a high-strung physical therapist who is supposed to be planning her wedding but may be getting cold feet.

They probably would have kept on like that, except Joy has disappeared. And hmm, now that you mention it, there was that weird con artist, Savannah (Georgia Flood), who ingratiated herself into Joy and Stan’s life under very dubious circumstances. She couldn’t have something to do with it, could she? Well, we better bounce between two timelines to make sure: The days since Joy’s disappearance tick ahead in one timeline as we excavate all the mean family dinners from eight months ago in the other.

The show hits its steady simmer with tense competence and with some good lines. “I didn’t know how to fix it, so I broke it,” Troy says of his marriage, though it applies to all the siblings and their behaviors pretty equally.