Annette Bening gives an excellent performance in the new seven-episode Peacock miniseries Apples Never Fall, but she shows up all the lesser acting around her to a distracting degree. She plays Joy Delaney, one half of a star pair of married tennis coaches whose academy attracted top players and made “the Delaneys” a force to be reckoned with in the sport.

When we meet them, the Delaneys are retiring in teary triumph after what seems to have been a long, golden career, surrounded by their loving grown-up children. The rest of the series will destroy this glowing image as family secrets and lies come tumbling out in the wake of two mysterious incidents. First, the arrival at the Delaney home of a young woman named Savannah (Georgia Flood), who seems to be the slightly bloodied victim of marital abuse and, rescued by the Delaneys, is soon ensconced in their home. And then the second mystery — the disappearance of Joy.

Suspicion immediately falls on Joy’s irascible husband, Stan (Sam Neill), whose angry and high-handed behavior has shaded over into emotional abuse — and occasional physical abuse — of his children. Embittered by a career trajectory that wasn’t nearly as impressive as he’d expected, he’s been taking it out on his family for decades. As Stan, Neill pulls out all the stops in grimacing and stalking around and growling his lines to indicate constant simmering rage underneath attempts to appear like the strong, stable patriarch, but it’s overkill and gets silly fast.