Molly Smith Metzler writes about women with less money standing in the houses of women with a great deal more, and she writes the grievance between them better than the satire around them. Sirens shows both the strength and the weakness in one series.
Fi1m perspective
Two sisters in Sirens (2025) cannot be in the same room for long before one of them says the thing the other has spent years not saying. That is the scene Molly Smith Metzler writes best, and she keeps coming back to it: a woman without money in a house that belongs to someone rich, and an old family quarrel that matters more to her than the house does. The class jokes are the setting. The grievance is the subject.
She started in the theatre. Elemeno Pea (2011) put a handful of people in one room and let them argue, and Cry It Out (2018), about new mothers and money, has been produced widely since. Television took her into other people's rooms first: Orange Is the New Black, Casual, then four seasons of Shameless between 2017 and 2019, where she was one writer among many. We liked that programme's noise and warmth and did not believe its poverty, and it is hard to say how much of either was hers. Maid (2021), which she created and ran, adapted from Stephanie Land's memoir, was the first series that was plainly her own, and it is the one most people know her for. We have not reviewed it and will not judge it here.
Sirens is the return to Elemeno Pea, fourteen years on. She has said of the adaptation, "I kept the five core characters. Everything else? I let go and started again," and it shows in both directions. What survived from the stage is the good part: two sisters, and scenes long enough for people to say more than they meant to. What was added is the weaker part. The wealthy eccentrics are of a kind we have met before, and the shifts from farce to distress can be clumsy, as though the programme has lost interest in the feeling it has just asked us to share. She writes with fellow playwrights, Bekah Brunstetter and Colin McKenna among them, and the dialogue has a playwright's shape, which suits the two-handers and slows the series when it needs to move.
We were surprised by how much the sisters got to us, given how little the satire around them did. A shared past comes up in a line neither of them wants to finish, and the joke that follows does not cancel it. Meghann Fahy carries most of that, and Metzler has given her a character who is funny and hard done by at the same time, which is rarer than it sounds.
The pattern so far is a writer with one true subject and a habit of dressing it in a genre it does not need. If the next series trusts the small room and the old quarrel, it will not need the rich people at all.
Biography
Molly Smith Metzler is an American playwright and screenwriter. She is the creator and showrunner of the Netflix limited series Maid (2021) and Sirens (2025). The latter is adapted from her 2011 play Elemeno Pea. Her television writing credits also include episodes of Shameless, Casual and Orange Is the New Black.
Metzler trained at NYU Tisch and the Juilliard School. As a playwright she is known for Elemeno Pea, which premiered at the Humana Festival of New American Plays, and Cry It Out. She has collaborated on writing with her husband, playwright Colin McKenna.
