You Should Be Watching ‘Siren’, Freeform’s Polyamorous Mermaid Show
A mermaid show is a hard sell. In the world of the supernatural television show vampires always have workaround for the pesky sunlight rule, werewolves only change once a month, and demons only possess the devilishly handsome — but how do you romance a mermaid when even lovers drown?
Humans have always been drawn to stories about the sea. With Aquaman’s cool billion, the Oscar success of The Shape of Water, and shows like Tidelands and The Terror coming to the surface, water is in again.
The ocean is still that mysterious and terrifying force that humbled Odysseus and inspired Coleridge; the planet’s last great frontier. Stories about creatures living in the sea, and the damage known or unknown that humans inflict on them, play into our wider cultural context of climate change. In the same way Godzilla was a reflection of the atomic bomb, the creatures from the deep come to shore in fiction as ice caps melt and tides rise around us in grim reality.
Modern mermaids inevitably end up in narratives about the other, the immigrant — for what are creatures who shed their skin in the sea to walk on land but a wider allegory for people migrating from one place to another? Couple that with the current political climate, and it would be impossible to make a mermaid show today without drawing on these issues.
And so it is with Siren.
Siren is set in the Pacific Northwest — Twilight country — in a fictional fishing town called Bristol Cove. The town is to mermaids what Roswell (also having a renaissance with overt immigrant themes over on the CW) is to aliens, where tacky festivals, Ariel costume parties, and kitschy mermaid pantomimes abound. The town stories are just there to entertain the locals…. except, of course, that All The Stories Are True.
The show has skimmed its toes into a deeper backstory for Bristol Cove, involving massacres, filicide, madness, and secret mermaid burial grounds. It anchors this to the modern story through the main characters being descendants of the town founders, because this is a pulp tv show and no one ever moves out of the town they grew up in.
All small and mythic towns have a military base close by, and so it is in Bristol Cove. The main storyline is set in motion when a secret government project kidnaps a mermaid after she is accidentally captured by a deep sea trawler, and her sister, Ryn (Eline Powell), comes to shore to mount a rescue.
Freeform is an arm of ABC which is owned by Disney, but the Sirens are deliberately not your Little Mermaids. The cliche of the otherworldly creature who arrives somehow speaking perfect English and blending in seamlessly is one that Siren avoids, to its credit. The sirens stare unblinkingly at every one and every thing, live on a diet of fish carcasses, and their humanskin starts to turn back into scales if they spend too long out of salt water.
And they are sirens, those treacherous creatures who tormented Odysseus with their song on his journey home to Ithaca, more than they are mermaids. The siren song is used by Ryn as an ethereal lure to bend men to her will — though it leads to unintended consequences for both the singer and the audience.
Ryn is the bait with which Siren wants to reel you in. It’s a deeply physical role, as the show walks the harder path of having its mermaids slowly learn language, and Powell performs it well. She’s a born predator, who comes to the surface ready and willing to kill anyone in her path. The show takes care in showing how violence is the status quo for the mermaids in the ocean as a means of survival, and the difficulties this brings once they arrive on land.
But the mermaids are quick learners, and watching Ryn try to understand the trappings of the human world, from how a cash register works to the nuances of relationships, is one of the show’s hidden treasures.
Teaching Ryn about the world is also a source of joy for the two main human characters, marine biologists Ben (Alex Roe) and Maddie (the fantastic Fola Evans-Akingbola). Ben is the son of the town’s most successful businessman, who spars with his father over environmental issues and also the care of his wheelchair-bound mother. Maddie is a descent of the Native American Haida people whose own father is Bristol Cove’s sheriff (the always brilliant Gil Birmingham). Ben and Maddie are in a relationship when the show begins.
Girlfriends of the male lead in a show like this are disposable by design — they are there to show us, by contrast, how special the connection with the strange newcomer female lead is. It’s taken for granted that viewers will be more invested in a relationship they watch unfold from the beginning than one which is already mature when the show begins. But Maddie is in every way Siren’s third lead, with storylines of her own and relationships with every other character. She is not an accessory to Ben’s story, and in this alone Siren feels revelatory for its genre.
Bristol Cove is a small town, and the relationships on the show reflect that; they feel lived-in, like the characters really have known one another their whole lives. Ben and Maddie went to the same school, and also grew up with Xander, the owner of the trawler where the mermaids first appeared. They are naturally all involved in one another’s affairs. Thrown into the mix too are their parents, making Siren one of those shows that feels fully realised because all of the characters are constantly interacting with one another.
Romance on Siren is not a forced thing — there’s no set quotient of romantic scenes set to soft pop music per episode for shippers to gif with abandon. The adversarial style of storytelling that encourages backing one romantic pairing for a character over another that was made popular during the marketing of Twilight, and which has since been a staple of pop culture, is being deliberately circumvented in Siren.
Instead the show focuses on the connections between all of its characters, positive and negative, dedicating itself to showing how Ryn has changed the status quo between characters like Ben and Maddie, or Maddie and her father, or Ben and Xander. It’s a risk for a show like this — nothing hooks a dedicated fanbase as fast as a ship to love or loathe — but one that has already begun to pay off, as it builds in its second season to something long overdue in the television landscape: a genuine polyamorous relationship.
The dynamic that has developed between Ben and Maddie and Ryn is layered and complex, but what is evident is that all three of them care for one another deeply. This mutual, triumvirate affection spools between them in a tangle that none of them can seem to unravel. The seperate forks of their relationship — Ben and Maddie, Maddie and Ryn, Ryn and Ben — are all given ample scenes; this isn’t just Ben and Maddie Plus Mermaid. There’s nothing close to jealousy, either, though it’s another genre trap that is easy for shows like Siren to fall in to.
There’s an emotional intelligence between Ben and Maddie and Ryn that gives every scene between them meaning and depth. It’s easy to watch their scenes and think that there’s something between the three of them — and just easy to quickly dismiss the notion, knowing that such a relationship isn’t the regular hunting grounds of American cable television.
The genius of Siren is that is has created dynamic that makes it clear that a polyamorous relationship is the most logical next step for these characters to take. That’s a tough sell on any show, but Siren achieves where others dare not step.
Layered on top of this interpersonal complexity are the implications of falling in love with a wild creature from the sea. A large part of Ryn’s journey is learning the implications for her actions — life in the ocean is brutally simple, but with humans things are not so clear. This has manifested as the show moves into a new season, and a deeper mythology, with examining the impact that Ryn’s siren song has begun to take on Ben after she sang to him in the show’s early episodes.
The siren song drives Ben to put himself, and sometimes others, in danger in order to protect Ryn. Supernatural themes will always go hand in hand with love stories that make men lose their minds. It’s a gauntlet thrown down by Buffy, the Ur-text of pulp tv, and subsequently picked up by every one of its successors that has tried to craft a Buffy/Angel relationship of their own.
Easy and waiting is the trap to frame Ben’s obsessive protectiveness as romantic, as other shows would and have done. But Siren is determined to ask deeper questions of its characters.
Instead parallels are drawn between Ben’s need for the siren song and addiction — here is Odysseus, chaining himself to the mast. It is Maddie who points out how Ben’s actions are similar to those of her own addict mother. Another show would vilify Maddie for questioning the connection between Ben and Ryn — but Siren knows she is right, and makes sure that Ben and Ryn and the audience know too, and it’s all so level headed and mature that you find that you have to remind yourself that this is a show about mermaids, god dammit! The song and its addictive properties become another hurdle in the Ben/Ryn/Maddie relationship, as Ben questions whether his feelings for Ryn are something separate from his addictive need for her song.
None of Siren’s narrative choices are the easy path. But the hard road makes for some fine television.
It helps that there’s no homeroom. The target demographic for this show is most likely teenagers, the Riverdale crowd, who are buttressed by the familiar frame of a school setting. The core characters of Siren aren’t teenagers — they’re a little older, a little richer, a little more set in their ways, and perhaps that’s another reason why the show is so remarkable. It’s incredibly refreshing to watch characters deal with a supernatural problem in a rational and logical manner — this is a catharsis I hadn’t known I needed before Siren made me realise what I’d been missing.
When I started Siren I was expecting a mermaid Vampire Diaries (or if I was really unlucky, a mermaid Shadowhunters); pulpy genre escapism that wasn’t so much good as it was entertaining. But what I found instead was a show dedicated to its characters, solid in its worldbuilding, that is savvy about its genre but not beholden to it. This is a show unafraid to spend an entire episode at a wake, following a mermaid — and, perhaps more importantly, a woman who has killed — as she tries to comprehend the overwhelming scope of grief.
Siren is breaking new ground by giving the mermaid an odyssey of her own. You should watch it.
