My Two Cents - TV Review: 56 DAYS on Amazon Prime Video

In the new limited series "56 Days" on Amazon Prime Video, Dove Cameron wants you to know she's all grown up. That's right. In case you missed her sultry 2022 pop hit "Boyfriend," in which the one-time Disney diva croons, "I could be a better boyfriend than him /

Up all night, I won't quit," she signed aboard this made-for-the-Zon sex thriller that feels like it's straight out of Sharon Stone's 1990s film roster.

It's based on a book of the same title by Catherine Ryan Howard, but I'm assuming it's only loosely so, because from what I saw in the book's synopsis, the literary events take place during the COVID-19 quarantine in Ireland. The Prime series is set in Boston, and not during any quarantine. Trust me: characters are getting up close and personal with each other left, right, and sideways, like something out of an episode of FX's "The Beauty."

In the show, Cameron's character, Ciara, meets the handsome and charming Oliver (played by Avan Jogia, who spends most of his scenes looking at her -- and everything else indiscriminately -- like it's a po'boy sandwich he's about to dunk into au jus and go to town on). She's a poor girl who's new in town and living in a dumpy apartment, working in IT support, while he's a rich boy who's new in town and living in an awesome apartment, working in architectural support.

It's a tale as old as time: he asks her out, she says yes, they meet for cocktails, then wham, bam, thank you ma'am, before you can say "Descendants: The Rise of Red," Cameron's got her clothes off and wearing Jogia's hand for a bra.

The show cuts back and forth from this burgeoning affair to the present day, when police discover the badly decomposed remains of a mystery person inside Oliver's apartment. There's no sign of Oliver or Ciara, and we're not sure who the corpse is, considering it's been submerged in what the police determine to be a mixture of oven cleaner and bleach. Most of the flesh has dissolved from the bones, leaving a tub full of goop which the the camera awards plenty of extreme close-ups.

So the cops, a "will-they-or-won't-they" tag team of detectives named Reardon and Connolly set to work in trying to figure out who their dead body belongs to, and what happened to him or her. So far, the going is slow, but I'm only midway through the second episode, so we'll see.

I'm making fun of it, but it's actually pretty good so far. And I like Dove Cameron. Yeah, I watched her in "Liv and Maddie" on Disney, and the first 3 Descendants movies, because my daughter fell into that target age demographic at the time, but she's a beautiful girl and a pretty decent actress, and she pulls off Ciara's bright-eyed-innocence-while-hiding-some-sinister-secret thing pretty good so far. Growing up is inevitable, and it seems like every Disney actress from her to Miley Cyrus to Zendaya have to have their "breaking the Disney mold" moment. This, apparently, is Dove's.

I'll keep watching for now, mostly because I am trying to walk an hour each day on my treadmill, because my diet has kind of plateau'd with my previous 45 a day, and I've run out of anime series I like well enough to keep me entertained while I hoof it for 60 full minutes.

Do I recommend it to other viewers? Sure, so far, why not? It's better than "All's Fair" with Kim Kardashian, and somehow I choked my way through that, too.

"56 Days" is available on Amazon Prime Video.