There’s no doubt that consumers of entertainment have a thing about plane crashes.
The idea that one minute, you’re on a journey of a lifetime to the next, scrambling to survive, makes for excellent drama and character introspection.
Keep Breathing hopes to combine a survival drama with the introspection that comes when your life almost passes you by in the blink of an eye.
In the vein of Tom Hanks’ Castaway comes Keep Breathing, the story of Liv (Melissa Barrera), a woman who pursues her career at the expense of everything else in her life.
Liv’s fateful day arrives as she’s leading one of the most important projects of her life.
She rallies her team with a determined bark. Nobody will stop until they’ve got what they need.
She puts her words into action when her infirmed father falls ill and is hospitalized. Although she’s urged to take the time to visit him, she thinks he’s just fine where he is — sedated and under a doctor’s care.
It’s no surprise that when the last-minute flight she’s taking to nail down project details gets canceled, she urgently tries to find another way to reach her destination.
She pushes her way onto a private flight with two men not eager to have her company, but she’s relentless, and they relent. As the logline suggests, Liv’s demands land her in remote Canada’s cold water.
If you wonder what kind of duo would have given in so quickly to Liv’s pleas to hitch a ride on their flight, you aren’t alone. But Liv is so laser-focused that she doesn’t sweat the small, non-project-related stuff.
Liv had put her life in the hands of two narcotics traffickers.
She only discovers this after the crash. With one man dead upon impact and the other gravely injured, she’s shocked to discover no one will be looking for them because they didn’t submit a flight plan. They aren’t the kind of people who want to be tracked.
Thus begins the real meat of the story, and I’m not going to give it all away here. Where’s the fun in that?
By this time, we’ve seen Liv’s determination, so the odds of her survival are pretty good. And she immediately snaps into action, gathering what she can use from the plane and taking stock of her surroundings.
Liv goes into full MacGyver mode, and I daresay that even though I might have made slightly different choices in her situation, they made sense, and, finally, walking in her shoes was an easier task.
But the kind of loneliness and desperation that comes from survival mode, even when your head is in the game, can lead you down unexpected paths.
While Liv is surviving and plotting her rescue from the tiny shores of her landing place, she begins to revisit her life and those who impacted it the most — her parents.
Liv is a product of a broken marriage that has affected every fiber of her adult life. Being abandoned by her mother cut her deep, and she closed the door on any relationship that might lead to breaking her already bruised heart.
Happiness was elusive under her former life strategy, and only by discovering what it really means to live will she find the peace she needs to accept love and friendship into her heart again.
Barrera captures the shock and aggravation of being cast away from the world without a safety net quite well. There’s one scene in particular where I could have easily inserted myself into Liv’s place.
She has the chops to carry the six episodes firmly on her shoulders, which is no small feat. Between her work on this and Vida, Barrera’s career will only rise from here.
Keep Breathing wasn’t what I expected, but executive producers and co-showrunners and writers Brendan Gall and Martin Gero (Blindspot, The Lovebirds) and Maggie Kiley (Dr. Death, Dirty John) take viewers on a thrilling adventure and remind us that there’s a difference between life and actually living.
Keep Breathing drops on Netflix on Thursday, July 28.
Carissa Pavlica is the managing editor and a staff writer and critic for TV Fanatic. She’s a member of the Critic’s Choice Association, enjoys mentoring writers, conversing with cats, and passionately discussing the nuances of television and film with anyone who will listen. Follow her on Twitter and email her here at TV Fanatic.