Summary
The Tailor does threaten to veer into dangerously soapy territory, but it’s well written and engaging enough to work as an easy binge-watch.
This review of the 2023 Netflix series The Tailor Season 1 does not contain spoilers.
Turkish film and TV is quietly among the best in the world, though with something like The Tailor, a based-on-true-events family melodrama with a surprisingly menacing streak, it isn’t always easy to tell.
Onur Güvenatam’s Netflix show is all over the place. It’s apparently true, yet wonderfully silly. It’s sometimes romantic, but never sexy, and is often quite suspenseful while always remaining entirely depth-averse. Some people will definitely hate it. Others, though, will be pretty taken by it – at least until a cliffhanger ending leaves it all entirely unresolved.
The Tailor Season 1 review and plot summary
Plot-wise, there’s an air of novelty here. Peyami is a wildly successful tailor from a well-to-do family whose fashion exploits have garnered him national fame. But he’s hiding a secret. His father, Mustafa, is severely mentally handicapped, which he has kept secret for his entire life, even from those closest to him.
Among those close to Peyami is Dimitri, the psychopathic son of an extremely wealthy man who is due, through an arranged marriage, to wed Esvet, a beautiful woman whom he summarily tortures. He wants Peyami to make her a dress, which he’s happy to do, but through information gleaned at the fitting, Esvet is able to flee from Dimitri’s clutches and reinvent herself as Mustafa’s caregiver, without Peyami knowing her real identity.
The Tailor navigates these interwoven relationships across seven episodes ranging from 30 to 45 minutes, building a lot of tension around Esvet’s deception and Dimitri’s psychopathy, while also sparing some time for romance and other family drama.
Is The Tailor good or bad?
It’s surprising how well-paced and written all this is. The revelations – of which there are plenty – never feel too farfetched, and even more complex matters of parentage, marriage, and inheritance are simplistic enough to keep track of. The events feel mostly logical and build to a reasonable payoff that, unfortunately, the show doesn’t stick around to show the extent of.
This isn’t the kind of show that will appeal to those who like relatable characters in their fiction, though. Dimitri is insane. Peyami is, at best, self-serving, and his family are deplorable too. Esvet is a victim, for sure, but she spares little thought for how her ruse may impact the lives of others. And on and on it goes.
Is The Tailor worth watching?
In a way, this is a more sophisticated kind of storytelling that doesn’t play to the crowd by softening its characters’ edges. And because of that the whole thing is more engaging, in my estimation, with consistently unpleasant people and their bleak worldviews steering a story that it’s easy to invest in and be a little swept away by.
There’s undoubtedly a soapy, melodramatic quality to The Tailor that some will find off-putting, but I think in this case the quality of the writing and performances just manages to save it. It’s certainly an ideal binge-watch proposition and it feels finely calibrated to appeal to that crowd, capping off almost every episode with some kind of twist or close call.
Mileage may vary, but for me, this is a show that comes with a cautious recommendation.
What did you think of The Tailor Season 1? Comment below.
