TV Talk: ‘Gilmore Girls’ veteran proves the MVP of ‘The Watchful Eye'

Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.

Teen-targeted TV has largely moved to online streaming — see: Amazon Prime Video’s “The Summer I Turned Pretty” — because that’s where teens are consuming entertainment. Surely the fact that Freeform’s “The Watchful Eye” will stream the next day on Hulu is its raison d’etre. Without that online viewing, it seems unlikely Freeform original scripted series would survive.

“The Watchful Eye” premieres with two episodes at 9 p.m. Monday on Freeform before moving to its regular 10 p.m. Monday time slot Feb. 6.

The series follows Elena Santos (Mariel Molino), a young woman who may not be the eager-to-please live-in nanny she presents herself as when she goes to work for an affluent Manhattan family in a mysterious apartment building, the Greybourne. The mysteries of the building itself prove to be the most intriguing elements of the series, alongside a grouchy elderly resident, Mrs. Ivy, brought to life with imperious perfection by Kelly Bishop, who played Lorelai’s mother on “Gilmore Girls.”

When Elena brings Mrs. Ivy a basket of pastries, Mrs. Ivy is quick with an acidic quip, calling it “the perfect gift for a diabetic who lives alone.”

Bishop’s crabby barbs are the No. 1 reason to tune into “The Watchful Eye,” though it’s unclear from the first hour how prominent she will be on a weekly basis.

Emily Fox, executive producer of “The Watchful Eye,” said this series and its apartment building setting are inspired in part by “Rebecca” and “Rosemary’s Baby.”

“There’s just something really compelling about the idea of an apartment building and the fact that it does contain so many stories and that all these people are so close to one another,” Fox said during the Freeform portion of the Television Critics Association 2023 winter press tour earlier this month. “There’s privacy, and yet there’s this community inside of the walls of the building. … It’s familiar, but it’s our version of a castle. And the palace intrigue is what’s so fun to play with.”

The premiere introduces a murder mystery within the walls of the building, but Fox said it’s more than that.

“It’s not just a whodunit. It’s all the different pieces (that) need to be assembled over the course of the series,” she said. “It’s a chess game, and it has a lot of different moving parts. And I think that’s what feels most Hitchcockian. It’s got that little bit of glamour and sheen to it — that also feels like Hitchcock.”

As for the show’s hints at the supernatural, Fox indicated it’s more of a vibe than something that will be explored more directly.

“To the degree that it is supernatural at all, what we really wanted to explore was the impossibility of knowing for real if what you are seeing is something you are really seeing,” she said. “If you see a ghost, then you saw a ghost. But there’s no way to prove it, and there’s no way for you to even to prove it to yourself except that you saw it (with) your own eyes. But is your brain playing tricks on you or is there an apparition there? What I loved about the way this was constructed was that’s always an open question, that there is always the possibility that Elena is seeing things, that this isn’t her imagination.”

Courtesy of Freeform

“The Watchful Eye” follows Elena Santos, a young woman with a complicated past, maneuvering her way into working as a live-in nanny for an affluent family in Manhattan. She quickly learns that everyone in the mysterious building has deadly secrets and ulterior motives. What they don’t know, however, is that Elena has some shocking secrets of her own. “The Watchful Eye” premieres Jan. 30 on Freeform and streams on Hulu.