There’s an odd comfort in watching true crime television — that morbid mix of popcorn voyeurism and moral self-assurance. You know, the cozy feeling of saying, “Well, at least I didn’t murder my church friend with an axe.” HBO Max’s Love & Death plays right into that sensation, retelling the Candy Montgomery story with a slick coat of prestige polish. The series, directed by Lesli Linka Glatter and Clark Johnson, and written by David E. Kelley, wants to be both an exploration of small-town repression and a meditation on sin. What it ends up being, however, is something between an above-average true crime reenactment and a suburban soap with better lighting.
This isn’t to say Love & Death is bad. It’s not. But like its protagonist — a homemaker who finds herself caught between boredom, passion, and bloody consequence — the show can’t quite decide what it wants to be. It’s gorgeously shot, capably acted, and paced like an afternoon sermon — steady, deliberate, and occasionally self-congratulatory.
The Holy Trinity of True Crime: Faith, Adultery, and Axe Murder
The series opens in 1978 Wylie, Texas — a place so beige it could have been designed by a colorblind Home Depot manager. Elizabeth Olsen stars as Candy Montgomery, a church-going wife and mother whose life is so perfect it’s practically screaming for disaster. Dissatisfied with casseroles and scripture study, she falls into an affair with Allan Gore (Jesse Plemons, doing his usual blend of passive sadness and moral confusion). Their relationship is less about lust and more about routine — an affair by appointment, complete with Tupperware-level planning and guilt management.
When the show leans into this banality, it works. Kelley’s script captures the absurd bureaucracy of adultery — lovers penciling in motel trysts between choir practice and PTA meetings. Olsen plays Candy as a woman not driven by passion, but by an almost existential boredom. She doesn’t want to destroy her life; she just wants to feel something.
The murder, when it comes, isn’t played for shock but for sick inevitability. Lily Rabe, as Allan’s wife Betty, brings a tremor of quiet menace to her scenes. You can see the rage simmering under the surface long before she picks up the axe. By the time blood stains the linoleum, you’re less horrified than grimly resigned.
Elizabeth Olsen, Patron Saint of Repressed Women
Olsen’s performance is the show’s saving grace — or perhaps its absolution. After years of playing witches, widows, and psychologically unspooling heroines, she brings a terrifying normalcy to Candy. Her version of the suburban killer isn’t evil; she’s just human in the worst possible way. When Olsen smiles, it’s a weapon — polite, restrained, and trembling with denial. She doesn’t play Candy as a monster but as a woman who made one fatal, horribly human mistake and couldn’t claw her way back out.
Kelley’s writing and Glatter’s direction clearly adore Olsen, often lingering on her face long enough for entire moral conflicts to unfold without dialogue. It’s a performance built on microexpressions — a twitch of guilt here, a flicker of arrogance there — all wrapped up in a package of perfect 1970s hair. If the series ever finds redemption, it’s in her eyes, wide with confusion and the faint recognition that she’s become her own worst parable.
Plemons, Rabe, and the Church of Repressed Misery
Jesse Plemons does what Jesse Plemons always does: he stands around looking like the human embodiment of a sigh. His Allan Gore is a man so deeply passive you almost believe he’d forget he was in an affair. There’s an interesting honesty to that performance — the idea that sometimes people drift into moral failure not out of malice but apathy.
Lily Rabe, meanwhile, turns in one of the show’s most quietly devastating performances. Her Betty Gore is brittle and haunted, a woman whose sadness is treated like a character flaw. She’s the ghost haunting the story even before she dies, and Rabe gives her a wounded dignity that the script doesn’t always provide.
Around them spins a cast of small-town archetypes — God-fearing gossips, smiling pastors, and nosey neighbors — all of whom seem vaguely aware that their community is a powder keg of suppressed emotion. Krysten Ritter, as Candy’s friend Sherry, offers a refreshing burst of cynicism, the one person in Wylie who seems to understand that everyone’s pretending not to notice the rot.
David E. Kelley and the Prestige True Crime Trap
If anyone knows how to turn scandal into sleek television, it’s David E. Kelley. From Big Little Lies to The Undoing, his work thrives on beautiful people committing ugly acts. Love & Death fits right into his wheelhouse — a morally murky character study that doubles as voyeuristic melodrama.
But that familiarity is also its biggest weakness. The show never feels dangerous or daring, just competent. There’s a sense that Kelley is recycling his own tropes — the morally gray heroine, the courtroom theatrics, the glossy confessionals — and simply transplanting them into a southern church potluck. The result is a story that’s compelling in moments but rarely surprising.
The cinematography by Lesli Linka Glatter is lush and moody, full of shadowed living rooms and golden suburban sunsets. It’s the kind of visual language that suggests something profound is happening, even when it isn’t. The score, meanwhile, hums along like a slow heartbeat, as if the show is perpetually on the verge of revelation. Spoiler: it never quite gets there.
A True Crime Echo Chamber
It’s impossible to watch Love & Death without comparing it to Candy, Hulu’s 2022 take on the same story starring Jessica Biel. The two series feel like alternate-universe versions of each other — one aiming for psychological nuance, the other for true-crime grit. Love & Death is the classier of the two, but it also feels like the safer one.
Variety wasn’t wrong when it called the show “well-made but unoriginal.” It doesn’t expand the genre; it just polishes it. The editing is patient, the dialogue is sharp enough, and the production design perfectly recreates 1970s Texas in all its avocado-colored repression. But we’ve seen this story before — not just in Candy, but in the entire cottage industry of suburban tragedy that’s come to define streaming-era prestige TV.
You can practically hear the algorithm whispering: Make it beautiful. Make it human. Make it bingeable.
The Verdict: Neither Guilty Nor Innocent
By the time the credits roll on Love & Death, you’re left with the strange sensation of having witnessed something impeccably crafted yet emotionally hollow. It’s the television equivalent of a well-set table with nothing to eat. Olsen’s performance deserves every bit of praise it’s gotten, but the series around her never quite matches her complexity.
There’s a brilliance buried in here somewhere — a study of faith, morality, and the banality of evil wrapped in the banality of marriage. But Kelley’s script never digs deep enough into those themes. Instead, it coasts on mood, nostalgia, and the easy shock value of a real-life murder case.
The show ends, fittingly, not with catharsis but quiet resignation. Candy walks free, her name smeared but her hands technically clean. It’s an ending that mirrors the series itself — an acquittal based on technical merit rather than passion.
Final Thoughts
Love & Death is neither saint nor sinner — just another streaming miniseries doing penance for our obsession with “based on a true story.” It’s too polished to fail, too familiar to excite. If you’re in it for Elizabeth Olsen’s performance or her curves, you’ll find plenty to admire. If you’re looking for something that redefines the genre, you might feel like you’ve been served leftovers from a much fancier feast.
In the end, Love & Death is exactly what its title promises: a story of devotion and destruction, told with all the solemnity of a sermon and the detachment of a true-crime podcast. It’s a show about a woman who couldn’t stop herself from going too far — made by people who, unfortunately, didn’t go quite far enough.
