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Deadwood Recap: Season 3, Episode 7, “Unauthorized Cinnamon”

The episode feels like a summation of the show’s thoughts on what it means to be mortal.



Deadwood, Unauthorized Cinnamon
Photo: HBO

“No one gets out alive, Doc.” That’s Al Swearengen (Ian McShane) talking to the tenderhearted, terminally ill Doc Coch ran (Brad Dourif) in Sunday’s Deadwood. Swearengen’s terse statement didn’t just reveal the empathy that has become his watchword; it was the key that unlocked this episode’s unexpected sweetness and wrenching power.

Death has always hovered over Deadwood; like many hard-edged TV dramas, it’s set in a savage universe that kills characters without warning. But Deadwood separates itself from nearly all other such series—with the possible exception of ABC’s “Lost”—by portraying death (and its kissing cousin, near-death experience) not just as random individual tragedies, but as communal events that have the power to change the course of human events.

On this series, unlike many others, no deceased character is ever forgotten; we are frequently and pointedly reminded of their passing, sometimes when we least expect it. Some invocations are straightforward—Charlie Utter (Dayton Callie) and Calamity Jane (Robin Weigert) visiting the grave of Wild Bill Hickok (Keith Carradine), for instance, and talking to him as if he were standing right there. Others are more subtle: Seth and Martha Bullock (Timothy Swearengen and Anna Gunn) walking the adopted daughter of Seth’s mistress, Alma Garret Ellsworth (Molly Parker), to school, a ritual they would have done with their own son if he hadn’t been trampled by a runaway horse.

The show’s sensitivity to pain and loss is so acute that it even extends beyond the series’s roster of lead and supporting characters, embracing people you never even knew when they were alive. At the end of the fourth episode of season one, the vigilante pursuit of Wild Bill’s killer was interrupted by the arrival of a horseman who rode into town bearing the severed head of a Native American—a bit of terrorist street theater, designed to divert Deadwood’s citizens from their domestic anxieties and unite them against a (manufactured, it turned out) external threat.

But rather than discard the head after it had served its purpose, Swearengen ended up stor ing it in a box in his office. From time to time—often when he needs to think out loud and can’t endure conversing with characters who likely aren’t as smart as he is—Swearengen will haul out the box and address it like Yo rick’s skull. Grotesque as this description may sound, Swea rengen’s conversations with the head illustrate the show’s empa thy; the gruff Western gangster, who in season one electrified throngs of hoopleheads with speeches about “dirt-worship ping heathens,” tenderly addresses the box as “Chief” and has, over time, gifted it with the personality of a wise warrior—Swearengen’s equal and perhaps even his shaman.

Sunday’s episode, “Unautho rized Cinnamon,” was so focused on death and its impact on the living that it felt like a summation of the show’s thoughts on what it means to be mortal. The title came from Al’s decision to call a meeting of the camp’s appointed officials and assorted powerbrok ers (including Bullock, Powers Boothe’s Cy Tolliver and Jeffrey Jones’s fussbudget newspaperman, A.W. Merrick) to decide what to do about a possible im pending attack by recently humiliated mining boss George Hearst (Gerald McRaney). Since season one, camp meetings have developed their own specific rituals, one of which is the consumption of canned peaches; in this episode, Swearengen’s palsied housekeeper, Jewel (Geri Jewell), decided to put cinnamon on the table to keep things lively. The “unauthorized cinnamon,” as henchman Dan Dority sneeringly called it, caused an allergic reaction in a candidate for public office; he fell to the ground, his throat closing up. He survived, but for a minute there, he thought he was a goner.

That charmingly absurd phrase “unauthorized cinnamon” became a stand-in for death it self, a specter that glides in without warning, snatching some souls and scaring others. The reaper had a busy schedule this week. Though there was a fair amount of the usual plot ad vancement—Hearst dancing around a gold claim offered by his cook’s son, Odell (Omar Gooding); the miner Ellsworth (Jim Beaver), Alma’s husband-in- name-only, returning to her home after a night’s absence to reassure her adopted daughter that he was still in her life—much of the episode concerned itself with death and loss. The script’s concentration on this topic recalled not just Donne’s phrase “Ask not for whom the bell tolls,” but also a line from Bob Dylan’s song “Shelter from the Storm”: “It’s doom alone that counts.”

Doc Cochran is at death’s door. Tolliver—who’s recovered from his own near-death experience at the hands of a knife- wielding minister, and now wavers between renewing his faith and redoubling his wickedness—told Swearengen that the camp should place a want ad in Eastern newspapers seeking a new physician. (Swearengen added, with evident contempt, “… once we’ve ceased our weeping.”) The telegraph operator Blazanov (Pasha D. Lynchnikoff) broke his own vow of confidentiality and told Swearengen about a telegram to Hearst that appeared to confirm an impending attack on Deadwood; Blazanov took this extraor dinary step because he had sur vived pogroms in Russia and feared similar carnage in his adopted home. Theatrical impre sario Langrishe (Brian Cox) visited a beloved old friend on his deathbed and listened as he described seeing white spots on his tongue. “I hear it whispering in my ear, ’Forget your name,’” his friend rasped—“it” meaning Death.

But the show’s powerful centerpiece was that camp meeting, a grimly amusing send-up of government formalities that evolved into a meditation on the value of every human life. It started out with Dan grousing at Jewel about the cinnamon—a thug on edge after his own near-death experience in a brutal streetfight, questioning everything he ever be lieved about his own worth. Then it acquired a melancholy tint when Charlie Utter stood up at the meeting to second Sweareng en’s call for a pre-emptive strike against Hearst, then sat down and added softly, “… as Wild Bill would have done.” At the mention of Bill’s name, the room fell silent.

But this was all just a setup for one of the most touching monologues the show has ever offered—the reading of Bullock’s condolence letter to the survivors of a Cornish mine worker who was slain by Hearst’s goons for daring to organize.

“It becomes my painful duty to inform you that Pasco Carwin was killed earlier this week,” said Merrick, reading Bullock’s letter to the assembled citizens in subdued tones. “His death seems to have been instantaneous, as he was stabbed through the heart. Pasco’s funeral occurred today and was attended by co-workers and friends who shared the same high opinion of him. Everything was done by kind hands that was possible under the circumstances, and a Christian burial was given him. I was not personally acquainted with Mr. Carwin, save for one encounter where he demonstrated grief and deep compassion at the passing of a friend. I knew him as an earnest worker and a diligent believer in right and wrong. His memory, I am sure, will always be with those who knew and loved him, among whose number I imagine you as first. A letter from you, which I found in his tent, causes me to convey this sad intelligence to you. Sincerely yours, Seth Bullock.”

At Swearengen’s insistence, Merrick agreed to print the letter in the camp’s newspaper, in order to “bear witness” to the worker’s death and galvanize the camp against Hearst. Six episodes into the show’s third and presumably final season, Milch’s larger intent finally announced itself: To demonstrate how life feeds writing, and how writing, in turn, shapes life—by expressing basic truths in language simple enough to move strangers to action. This might seem a tall order in a place as foul as Deadwood. But the assembly’s astonished silence after the reading suggested that the impossible had already occurred: One letter had pushed nearly everyone within earshot toward common cause, cementing a civilizing process that had begun in the series pilot.

One was inevitably reminded of all the Deadwood characters who changed their lives, even their personalities, after glimps ing the abyss. Former prostitute and whorehouse madam Joanie Stubbs (Kim Dickens), who sur vived a massacre at her own brothel, became a makeshift social activist, and in this week’s episode, shared a romantic kiss with her friend and ward, Calamity Jane (Robin Weigert). Alma, a society dame who became a town powerbroker after her husband was murdered; now she’s spiraling into drug addiction again, and fears either dying or allowing her adopted daughter to suffer. (Watching the child sleep, Alma repeated, “I want to be good. … I want to be good …”)

Then there’s Bullock, who sur vived a brutal fight with a Native American scout on the frontier, then returned to camp and never left; and Tolliver, a dirtbag might still be within redemption’s grasp; and the Reverend Andy Cramed (Zach Grenier), a degenerate gambler and rascal who caught the plague in season one, survived both his illness and being dumped in the woods on Tolliver’s orders, then remade himself as a man of God.

And let’s not forget Swea rengen himself; his evolution has been too gradual to diagram exactly, but his shift from villain to antihero was cemented after he survived a bloody bout with kid ney stones in season two. (The horrifying sequence where he squeezed the stones out of his body was deliberately written and staged to suggest a ghastly version of labor and birth.) Even Dan Dority seems a different man after his brush with the hereafter; too weary to resume his old ways, he admitted that his old adver sary Bullock had written a very fine letter, and then attempted a fumbling explanation of what it meant to “bear witness.”

“As witness that Bullock wrote a nice f———letter,” Dority snarled, “and it proves that that’s the sort we are here, the caring sort that would write a letter of that ilk, and we don’t give a f—- who knows it.”

Once you know you could die at any moment, what do you do with that knowledge? The details are meaningless; in the end there are really only two choices: business as usual, or change. That so many Deadwood characters embrace the latter makes it, for all its profanity and bloodshed, the most inspiring series on American TV right now (although HBO’s The Wire, which returns this fall, might give it a run for its money.) Change, for these characters, means rejecting lawlessness—and with it, the freedom to be immoral or uncaring—and form a civilization with a government and laws and some semblance of manners. And it means conceding that in some cases, at least, the good of the group must eclipse the needs of the individual.

That’s why Hearst is so chilling—because he doesn’t just reject that philosophy, he seeks to destroy anyone who honors it, and make the world safe for people men who “seek the color,” meaning gold.

“I hate these places, Odell,” he says, in another scene from Sunday’s episode, “because the truth that I know, the promise that brings, the necessities that I’m prepared to accept make me outcast.” Then, astonishingly, he tears up a bit. “Isn’t that foolishness,” he says grimly. “An old man disabused of certain yearnings and hopes as to how he would be held by his fellas … and yet I weep.”

Hearst frames his tears in terms of momentary weakness; he’s telling Odell he’s ashamed because he’s defined his own ruthlessness as a positive value, and therefore should have no reason to feel sad when other people treat him as an ogre. But he’s really weeping because he knows, deep down, that his ruthlessness makes him something less than human—that while the majority of the species, whatever its individual faults, is at least capable of prizing love over money on occasion, Hearst can’t even meet that baseline standard of decency. He prizes riches over all else and unleashes his fury when anyone of any social station dares obstruct him. To repudiate greed is to re pudiate Hearst and people like Hearst; to stand against Hearst is to stand for civilization.

In this unexpectedly touching scene, Deadwood defines its humanistic values. A line has been drawn; to step over it—to treat people as a means to an end, instead of recognizing their unique radiance and their poten tial for evolution and then encouraging it—is define oneself as evil, perhaps irredeemably so.

This is not moral relativism as practiced on “The Sopranos,” it’s a sophisticated absolutism. In Milch’s universe, good and evil aren’t starkly defined opposites; they exist on the same continuum. A Deadwood character’s position on the continuum de pends on his or her willingness to identify with, then comfort and protect, other people.

Swearengen slid to the other end of the continuum long ago, and two marvelous moments in Sunday’s episode suggest that if he doesn’t know it, he’ll get there eventually. One scene finds him being offered colorful fabric swatches to hide the finger lopped off by Hearst; McShane’s curiously introspective expression implies that on some level, he realizes that the loss of his finger is an objective correlative for being traumatically separated from his mother in childhood, an event that presumably set him down the path toward savage selfishness. The salesman tells him that the swatches will be a comfort to him, telling him, “Mama’s got you, little lamb. … Everything will be all right.”

In the end, though, he gives the swatches to Doc Cochran—actually, he hurls them onto the street from the balcony of the Gem saloon, before ordering Doc upstairs for a visit. Before Doc ambled along, Al had been up on the balcony by himself, watching citizens pass by on the street below, each citizen lost in his own private moment, but always intersecting in a wide shot that confirmed his status as but one molecule in the larger human organism.

It’s no coincidence that the music in this scene was the same player piano song that scored the final sequence of season one, which ended with the still wicked Swearengen, then only beginning his journey toward decency, standing on the interior balcony of the Gem and watching the gambling, drinking and carousing down below—a prince of vice, ruler of all he surveyed. That sequence and Sunday’s were composed and edited to bring out their similarity, but the deeper difference was impossible to miss. Al is still near the top of the camp’s pecking order, but his vantage point has changed from night to day. He’s kinder and more forward-thinking than he used to be, even if he doesn’t yet realize it. He throws the swatches to Doc because he doesn’t need their comfort.

Deadwood’s got him, little lamb; everything will be all right.

This article was originally published in the Star-Ledger.



Review: In The Virtues, Transience Is a Path to Personal Redemption

The series is a reminder that facing up to one’s problems doesn’t guarantee release, but does allow for the possibility of moving forward.




The Virtues
Photo: Topic

Transience is a recurring motif in Shane Meadows’s The Virtues. The four-episode series is filled with scenes in which recovering alcoholic Joseph (Stephen Graham) trudges through city streets and countryside roads toward an uncertain future. Unmoored after his ex-wife, Debbie (Juliet Ellis), announces that she’s moving with their son, Shea (Shea Michael Shaw), to Australia, Joe relapses in a big way. Seeking to regain some hold of his life, he decides to return to his native Ireland to track down his sister, Anna (Helen Behan), whom he hasn’t seen since he was sent to an orphanage after their parents’ deaths. Joe’s return home triggers confrontations with traumatic memories warped and repressed by time, suggesting that the only way to overcome one’s past is to confront it head on.

Meadows’s work as a filmmaker has charted how misery and hopelessness manifests in post-imperial Britain. He’s always had an intuitiveness that transcends the ostensible realism of his desaturated palettes and handheld camerawork, and here he shows a new level of aesthetic subjectivity. When Joe is sober, his tremors rhyme with the shaking of the camera; when Joe drinks, however, the camera turns sedate, swaying more slowly as the relief of intoxication washes over him, followed by sudden, erratic cuts when he inevitably blacks out.

Meadows visualizes Joe’s repressed memories with snatches of home-video-grade images of the man’s childhood. The blotchy, low-resolution of the video, redolent of Harmony Korine’s early work, manifests Joe’s hazy grasp on his past, and the escalating intercutting of such clips with the present-day material as the series progresses mimics the overwhelming rush of his recalling the full extent of his trauma. Meadows parcels out this footage with precision, teasing us with the indecipherable images until what’s being depicted becomes all too clear.

As nervous as Joe is in conversations with others, he’s also quick to befriend strangers. And he has a special affinity for children, at once playfully immature and genuinely tender and caring toward them. In his farewell with Shea, Joe humbly reassures him that it’s okay if he calls his stepfather, David (Vauxhall Jermaine), “dad.” Like many an addict, Joe can be overwhelming and caustic, but Graham foregrounds the man’s unending attempts to tamp down his worst impulses, focusing less on Joe’s capacity for overbearing behavior and more on his shame and ability to charm people in spite of his withdrawn, nervous energy.

As the series progresses, Joe’s struggles are contrasted with other characters dealing with their own suppressed issues. His sister-in-law, Dinah (Niamh Algar), is introduced as a brash, sarcastic self-starter who can punch out any man who hassles her, but she nurses a brooding shame over having to give up a baby she had as an unwed teen. Meanwhile, Joe gets a job at his brother-in-law’s (Frank Laverty) construction business, where he meets Craigy (Mark O’Halloran), a tetchy worker with a checkered past who remembers living with Joe in the orphanage as kids. Craigy is even more of a nervous wreck than Joe, often barely able to get to the end of a sentence without circumnavigating the globe to get to the point. Joe and Craigy are kindred spirits, as they understand each other’s pain, but they’re also triggers for one another, leading to as many moments of strife as camaraderie.

With This Is England and its various TV spinoffs, Meadows tracked the political and social upheavals of modern England through an intimate network narrative of closely entwined stories. The Virtues isn’t particularly concerned with the political history of Ireland, but rather the lingering pressures of the religious shame and abuse that shape addled individuals. The finale brings the tacit influence of such personal and institutional manipulations into clarity along with the full extent of the characters’ trauma in a tautly edited climax that bridges Joe, Dinah, and Craigy’s struggles into a series of tense confrontations in which grace is either bestowed or brutally withheld. Like many of Meadows’s projects, the series has a clear ending that nonetheless leaves the characters’ futures bleakly irresolute. It’s a reminder that even facing up to one’s problems doesn’t guarantee release, but it does at least allow for the possibility of moving forward.

Cast: Stephen Graham, Niamh Algar, Helen Behan, Mark O’Halloran, Frank Laverty, Juliet Ellis, Shea Michael Shaw Network: Topic

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Review: One Day at a Time Remains a Comforting Mix of Head and Heart

The show’s fourth season serves as a reliable and comforting balm suited for the current moment.




One Day at a Time
Photo: Pop

In the aftermath of 9/11, audiences sought solace in familiar shows like Friends, which took place in a world untouched by the tragic event and populated with beloved characters who were confronting more mundane, everyday problems. Today’s television landscape is too diffuse to point to a single, obvious source of comfort, but as Americans face the expanding COVID-19 crisis, self-isolating and assessing the risks of death and economic disaster, shows like One Day at a Time, now in its fourth season, serve as a welcome balm.

The series follows the Alvarez family as they confront social issues that, while timely and relevant, feel entirely manageable when compared to a global pandemic. The tight-knit family reflects on topics like sex, relationships, and money through an intergenerational lens, as Penelope (Justina Machado) absorbs blows from two age-divided fronts: her teenage children, Elena (Isabella Gomez) and Alex (Marcel Ruiz), and her mother, Lydia (Rita Moreno).

In one episode, Alex walks in on a family member masturbating, triggering a discussion about female sexuality and self-pleasure. “Sex is between people who are married,” Lydia says. “It is Adam and Eve, not ‘bzzzt’ and Eve.” As in previous seasons of One Day at a Time, Moreno’s riotous line readings and her character’s hijinks—shopping for crabs at the fish market, catfishing Penelope’s potential suitors—imbue the show with endearing archness. But every member of the family gets their fair share of deviously funny verbal jabs, punching up or down a generation to reject what they deem naïve or reactionary.

When the blowups cool down, as they always do, Penelope summarizes the takeaways with a blend of sweetness and didacticism that falls just on the right side of a public service announcement. Real-world context renders these resolutions reassuring rather than trite: No difficulty in the series is impossible to overcome, so long as the Alvarezes stick together.

The promise of unconditional unity that permeates One Day at a Time comes through not only in grand apologies and lessons, but also in subtler interactions. In season one, Lydia worked through her religious objections to Elena’s coming out in less than a minute; here, when she speaks to Elena and her significant other, Syd (Sheridan Pierce), she refers to Syd by their preferred pronoun. Lydia’s casual use of the word “them” reflects her ability to internalize practices and behavior that make her loved ones feel safe. The moment understatedly captures Lydia’s radical personal growth, the kind people achieve when they demand the best of each other. That, One Day at a Time insists, is what love looks like.

Cast: Justina Machado, Rita Moreno, Isabella Gomez, Marcel Ruiz, Todd Grinnell, Stephen Tobolowsky, Sheridan Pierce Network: Pop

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Review: Devs Is an Exposition-Heavy Rumination on the Nature of Humanity

The series’s synthesis of aesthetic, plot, and subtext slowly starts to pull apart in its exposition-heavy second half.




Photo: Raymond Liu/FX

Alex Garland’s Devs is the writer-director’s latest rumination on the nature of humanity in the face of both technology and the unknown. As in much of Garland’s prior work, the Hulu limited series uses speculative fiction to address both contemporary social malaise and deeper metaphysical questions on the nature of human life.

The show’s title alludes to the deliberately generic, misleading name of a supercomputer capable of peering into the past and predicting the future, a MacGuffin that allows for a treatise on determinism. Using quantum algorithms, Forest (Nick Offerman), the mysterious owner of a computing company named Amaya, can trace the chains of cause and effect that guide our lives beneath the illusion of free will. Or, as Forest himself says to a new programmer, Sergei (Karl Glusman), our lives aren’t chaotic, but rather ordered “on tramlines.”

Sergei is swiftly revealed to be a corporate spy who infiltrated Amaya to steal code for Russia. Outed almost immediately, he finds himself confronted by Forest and Amaya’s head of security, Kenton (Zach Grenier), who kills the would-be thief and stages his death as a spectacular suicide, much to the confusion and grief of Sergei’s girlfriend, Lily (Sonoya Mizuno), a software engineer at Amaya who sets about digging into the truth.

At first, Devs’s straightforward murder mystery and broader philosophical questions dovetail seamlessly. Lily’s amateur sleuthing around Amaya’s compound and a thoroughly gentrified San Francisco positions the series as pure noir, a genre quite conducive to exploring existential and metaphysical quandaries. It’s especially fitting for a consideration of determinism, with Lily’s attempt to work out what happened to Sergei aligning with the supercomputer’s ability to reconstruct the past based on behavioral clues. This represents the ultimate endpoint of technology’s capability to reshape humanity’s self-conception, demonstrating that you can program software so intricately that it can disprove free will. As Lily struggles to make sense of her life being turned upside down, Devs regularly returns to Forest and his sedate, wizened calm, that of a man who sits upon the mountaintop and sees all.

Garland, as ever, devotes a great deal of care to the show’s sense of atmosphere. Set in and around Silicon Valley, Devs reflects the modern look of the tech industry in much the same way that Spike Jonze’s Her used hazy, soft lighting and warm colors to evoke the sleekness and comfort of Apple’s aesthetic. People arrive at Amaya’s main building, all glass windows and open desks, as if to a college campus. The Devs building itself, with its Brutalist exterior and series of cube-shaped rooms and gold-lined walls, is a radical break from reality that nonetheless manifests the internal logic of tech culture. At heart, it’s a giant computer that programmers work within, a windowless space where humans are at once spying and being spied upon in an extreme visualization of our surveillance society.

This initial synthesis of aesthetic, plot, and subtext slowly starts to pull apart, however, as Devs drags into its second half. Garland frontloads the series with narrative exposition, revealing to the audience (and Lily) most of the mystery behind Sergei’s death, the depth of his clandestine connections, and the totality of influence that a mega-rich CEO like Forest can exert in the late-capitalist Shangri-la of Silicon Valley. That leaves the series to start spiraling into stranger and ever more forced twists, from an awkward romantic subplot between Lily and her cybersecurity ex, Jamie (Jin Ha), to Kenton’s increasingly ludicrous omnipresence and seeming invulnerability to physical harm (one starts to expect a Westworld-like twist to reveal him as a robot). Similarly, Forest’s motivating obsession over his lost child is telegraphed by the colossal statue in the girl’s image that looms over the Amaya compound.

Early on, the balance between open discussion of Devs’s themes and the use of setting and tone to convey said themes is a careful one, but soon the series gives itself over to long-winded monologues that make the subtext text. The later episodes grind to a halt as the contours of a philosophy that were already neatly summarized in the pilot are more arduously explained to viewers. The series momentarily rebounds when it starts to consider the role that chaos plays in shaping the supposedly absolute tramlines of existence, using clever editing and doubling effects to show all the various permutations that any given moment of a person’s life could have gone depending on small variations of behavior. Soon, though, this provocative visualization of unpredictability and random chance gives way to characters standing around debating such ideas, reducing the surreal to the academic.

Devs frustratingly comes too sharply into focus at the expense of leaving some of its more evocative ideas unsaid. The story’s metaphors become increasingly obvious, such as Forest’s long hair and beard turning him into a cult-like leader, an image regularly juxtaposed with his team’s repeated projections of Christ’s crucifixion. As the show’s visual storytelling is increasingly subsumed by explanatory dialogue, the more tragic insinuations of Forest’s obsessions become lugubriously spelled out as others tie the Devs project ever more explicitly to his personal trauma. There’s plenty to chew on in Devs, but the protracted serial format robs Garland of his best trait, of knowing when to let the audience fill in the gaps on their own.

Cast: Nick Offerman, Sonoya Mizuno, Jin Ha, Zach Grenier, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Cailee Spaeny, Alison Pill, Karl Glusman Network: FX

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The 25 Best Netflix Original Series to Watch Right Now




The 25 Best Netflix Original Shows
Photo: Netflix


I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson

25. I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson


Marvel's Luke Cage

24. Luke Cage


Lady Dynamite

23. Lady Dynamite


The Crown

22. The Crown


Seven Seconds

21. Seven Seconds


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Review: HBO’s The Plot Against America Offers a Flattened Take of a Prescient Novel

The series feels ordinary, so of a piece with other politically engaged prestige television.




The Plot Against America
Photo: Michele K. Short/HBO

Philip Roth’s 2004 novel The Plot Against America imagines a world in which aviation hero and Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh beats Franklin D. Roosevelt to become president of the United States in 1940. In the author’s terrifying alternate history, Lindbergh forges an “understanding” with Adolf Hitler in Iceland, and the Axis powers gradually take over the world while America celebrates its isolationism and economic robustness. And Roth adds to this high concept a meta-textual wrinkle: The narrator of the book is himself as a young boy, and the protagonists are the Roth family, whose names correspond with the author’s real relatives. The book, then, is an imagining not only of a global atrocity, but of the atrocity’s effect on the psychology of a Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey that increasingly feels the threats of a country turning to fascism. The use of real names suggests that Roth is wrestling personally with the lingering emotional effects of his country’s not-so-hidden possibility for evil, memorably calling these emotions a “perpetual fear.”

The Plot Against America scans differently in 2020 than in 2004, now that Americans are familiar with the consequences of electing a famous person with fascist, purposefully divisive tendencies to the presidency. Roth’s prose, especially pertaining to how quickly an electorate rationalizes once-forbidden behavior, now feels eerily prescient—until one considers that rulers with fascistic tendencies often follow the same playbook. In HBO’s six-episode adaptation of Roth’s novel, showrunners David Simon and Ed Burns have occasional, wicked fun rhyming Lindbergh’s America with Trump’s. The characters here talk of what is “presidential,” and someone remarks of how the press repeatedly promotes Lindbergh’s signature publicity stunt, and no matter how many times he does it—a pointed reference to the gargantuan amount of free press that Trump continues to enjoy. The series’s ending also delivers a sick punch, referencing contemporary voter fraud and gerrymandering while denying the viewer the reassuring closure that Roth offered his readers.

In many fashions, however, Simon and Burns vastly simplify Roth’s vision. There’s a sense of casualness in the novel, a casualness that Simon and Burns conjured in The Wire, that’s missing from this production. Much of the book, written in a kind of oratorical style that’s characteristic of Roth’s work, is devoted to the quotidian of American life, especially from the perspective of American Jews. There are ritualistic celebrations of every element of day-to-day routine, from the buying of food, to the performance of chores, to the nightly listening to the radio, to strange sexual urges, to the tensions that arise when some family members are more successful than others. Above all, Roth celebrates America even as it succumbs to insanity, dramatizing the allure of actualization and improvement, bolstered by the sensuality of pop culture, which continues to be the nucleus of the American ideal. Such rituals often occur in the background of the limited series, but Simon and Burns are more concerned with narrative, and as a result they iron out many of Roth’s fascinating ambiguities and details. Roth created characters of many contradictions and particulars as well as a society of many procedural contours, while Simon and Burns move markers through a great tangle of plot developments.

This is no longer a story of the Roth family, as Simon and Burns have given them the surname Levins, and Lindbergh’s ascension is no longer framed as a haunted reminiscence. Philip (Azhy Robertson), the novel’s central consciousness, is now a cutely wide-eyed boy who observes much but says little. His father, Herman (Morgan Spector), is furious with Lindbergh’s rise, though the man’s fury is also linked to his struggles as a low-paid insurance man living in the shadow of his mercenary brother, Monty (David Krumholtz). Simon and Burns dial down Herman’s anger, positioning the father in hero poses, and his rivalry with Monty is referenced but minimized. Philip’s mother, Bess (Zoe Kazan), a source of great, powerful reverence for Roth in the book, is imbued by Kazan with masterful vulnerability, though the character’s great scene—a phone call that potentially saves a boy’s life—is intercut with other moments for the sake of an efficiently momentous climax. Philip’s cousin, Alvin (Anthony Boyle), a scoundrel turned patriot turned scoundrel again, is also sentimentalized into a more or less conventional hero, while the flirtation of Philip’s brother, Sandy (Caleb Malis), with Lindbergh worship—that is, a desire to live as a gentile or a “normal American”—is also reduced.

Two other pivotal characters are also flattened, further sanitizing Roth’s fury. The true villain of the novel isn’t Lindbergh, but Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf (John Turturro), a Jewish intellectual who allows himself to be used by the Lindbergh administration so as to “kosher” the president, giving Christians permission to vote for the candidate and indulge their anti-Semitism. Roth’s portrait of Bengelsdorf verges on a Dickensian caricature of opportunism, though in the series he appears to authentically believe in Lindbergh. This alteration renders him a poignant yet vaguely defined fool, as Simon and Burns have largely elided the character’s frustration and near-contempt for lower-class Jews—a thorny and resonant conceit that Roth acutely dramatized. Meanwhile, Bengelsdorf’s wife and Bess’s sister, Evelyn (Winona Ryder), is sapped of the ugly shrewdness that she possessed on the page. (A brilliant scene in the novel, in which Philip feels stirrings of sexual desire as he hugs his aunt, while simultaneously understanding her to be a traitor, has been unforgivably jettisoned.)

The novel serves to explain why HBO’s The Plot Against America feels so ordinary, so of a piece with other politically engaged prestige television. Collectively, Simon and Burns’s alternations serve to contort the narrative into a story of good guys against bad guys, flattering our distanced 21st-century perspective and comfortably preaching to Americans who’re fed up with Trump’s cruelty and incompetency. Roth uncomfortably understands that for people who aren’t white male Christians, there can exist an either/or divide between “American” and whatever portion of their identity that’s easily vilified by the Lindberghs and Trumps of the world. The quest in Roth’s novel becomes a desire to unify Jewish with American, which leads to much internal turmoil in the community. By contrast, the series is more concerned with the quest to stop Lindbergh. The neurotic, hallucinatory, surreal power of Roth’s prose vanishes, and is replaced by forgettable televisual stylistics (that distinctly gauzy, over-produced period HBO atmosphere) and quite a bit of speechifying. Though Simon and Burns at least understand that the sleeper-cell hatred that Lindbergh unleashes is intensely real, and has been unlocked by another enterprising charlatan.

Cast: Morgan Spector, Zoe Kazan, John Turturro, Anthony Boyle, Azhy Robertson, Caleb Malis, David Krumholtz, Ben Cole, Steven Maier, Michael Kostroff, Ed Moran, Graydon Yosowitz, Keilly McQuail, Lee Tergesen Network: HBO

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Review: Little Fires Everywhere’s Study of Race and Class Is Doused in Melodrama

The show’s strength lies in the rich context that surrounds its occasionally melodramatic conflicts.




Little Fires Everywhere
Photo: Hulu

The Shaker Heights of Little Fires Everywhere is the sort of suburban hamlet that requires homes to keep their grass below six inches. Its duplexes are even designed to disguise themselves as single-family homes, as upstairs and downstairs entrances are quietly consolidated behind a single outward door in order to, as Elena Richardson (Reese Witherspoon) explains to artist Mia Warren (Kerry Washington), “avoid any stigma of renting.” But Elena’s own unacknowledged prejudices—against people of color and the lower “class”—are matched only by her white guilt. She recognizes Mia’s dirty hatchback as the one she reported to authorities earlier that day after noticing someone who appeared to be sleeping in it. So Elena rents one side of her duplex to Mia, and from there, everything changes.

The biggest change, of course, is the mysterious fire that consumes the separate, much-larger Richardson residence in the flash-forward scene that opens the first episode. But much of the Hulu series, based on Celeste Ng’s novel of the same name, covers the various smaller changes in the leadup to the fire. For example, Mia’s daughter, Pearl (Lexi Underwood), falls in with the Richardson kids, enchanted by their comparative lux lifestyle. Until settling in Shaker Heights, Mia and Pearl lived a transient lifestyle, with Mia taking odd jobs like waitressing to supplement sales of her art. Pearl has never, until now, even had a room of her own.

Mia is thus confronted with the byproduct of her hectic lifestyle, where Pearl has been left lonely and quite susceptible to the Richardsons’ glamorous upper-class privilege. She grows wary of the family that so enraptures her daughter, though she also takes a shine to Elena’s youngest child, Izzy, (Megan Stott), a rebellious and artsy kindred spirit. The tensions between these characters—along lines of class, race, and wherever they intersect—simmer and eventually boil over, landing the families on opposing sides of a legal battle that only tangentially concerns them. Bebe (Huang Lu), Mia’s co-worker and an illegal Chinese immigrant, fights for custody of the daughter she once abandoned with a white family, the McCulloughs, who are friends of the Richardsons and eager to adopt.

The show’s strength lies in the rich context that surrounds these occasionally melodramatic conflicts, rendering Mia in particular with vivid detail. In its best moments, Little Fires Everywhere resists drawing clear lines between who’s right and who’s wrong: Mia’s reservations about the Richardsons are totally justifiable, though her reactions sometimes feel overprotective, like when she takes a job in the Richardson house primarily to keep an eye on Pearl. She can be cold and even cruel, but she’s also given to a quiet kindness toward Izzy and Bebe due to a sense of solidarity. Far from some angelic portrait of the lower class, Mia is a fascinating, complex character, and Washington modulates her stoicism with no small amount of disdain, anger, and apprehension.

The series, however, too often paints with a broad brush, particularly where the Richardsons are concerned. Fleeting anecdotes tossed off in the novel by an omniscient narrator to shade in the characters’ backstories feel goofy and extraneous when depicted here via full-fledged, fleshed-out scenes, like when Izzy refuses to play a concert and writes “NOT YOUR PUPPET” on her forehead. Elena’s tidiness is meant to signify her upper-class privilege; she has more than enough means to micromanage every facet of her life. When she does things like strictly schedule sex with her husband (Joshua Jackson), though, the series ventures into caricature.

For however much Elena’s own habits are clearly tinged with privilege and solipsism, she provides refuge for Pearl and the McCulloughs in a way that doesn’t seem entirely self-serving. Yet some of those nuances dissipate as the custody battle consumes the series. Though Bebe and the McCulloughs initially feel like pawns in the larger Warren/Richardson feud, the conflict eventually flattens into a more rigid portrait of right and wrong as the script reveals Elena and Mia’s backstories and motivations. Little Fires Everywhere never quite resists the occasional hokey flourish either, from sappy dream sequences visualizing Mia’s fears to the various on-the-nose cover songs that conclude each episode. The series never loses sight of its fraught interplay of race and class, but the initial intensity with which it explores those subjects dims as melodramatic coincidences and speeches accumulate.

Cast: Kerry Washington, Reese Witherspoon, Joshua Jackson, Lexi Underwood, Megan Stott, Jade Pettyjohn, Gavin Lewis, Jordan Elsass, Huang Lu, Rosemarie DeWitt Network: Hulu

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Review: Breeders Finds Catharsis Amid the Agony of Parenthood

The lighting-strike chemistry of the show’s central couple fuels its exploration of parenthood’s highs and lows.




Photo: Miya Mizuno/FX

Throughout FX’s Breeders, golden-hued flashbacks contrast the idyllic past of Paul (Martin Freeman) and Ally (Daisy Haggard) with the couple’s present, an epoch marked by the din of their sweet, utterly exhausting children: seven-year-old Luke (George Wakeman) and four-year-old Ava (Jayda Eyles). Paul and Ally used to wake up with giddy energy, eager to call out of work in order to stay in bed together. Now they start the day defeated, having barely rested after soothing Luke’s nighttime fears of being burned or burgled to death. Which is to say that, for Paul and Ally, parenthood has meant giving up a great deal of things—not just sleep, but also romance, liberty, and impulsivity, to name a few.

The series, co-created by Simon Blackwell, Chris Addison, and Freeman, primarily deals in dark comedy, with much of its humor stemming from Paul’s often vitriolic parenting style. Where Ally is cool and lighthearted, Paul suffers from an especially quick temper: When the kids are too loud for too long, he shouts at them with riotous zeal that he instantly regrets. Paul’s outbursts are hilarious and relatively rare. More common are his equally funny, gentler rejoinders to the kids. Freeman skips the beats that usually separate stimuli and responses, making each yell and hiss feel particularly authentic and acerbic—like when Luke asks to go home while Ally sobs at a deceased pet’s burial, and Paul urges him to “sense the tone.”

Paul’s and Ally’s behavior is contextualized by the presence of their own parents, who weave in and out of the show’s episodes. Ally, for one, both channels and rejects the parenting methods of her itinerant father, Michael (Michael McKean), who was absent in her youth but whose beatnik chill we recognize in her calm and unwavering devotion to her children. Elsewhere, Paul’s parents—the endearingly foul-mouthed Jackie (Joanna Bacon) and Jim (Alun Armstrong)—are regular springboards for his ruminations on life. In conversations with them, he wonders if the elementary school he went to led to his uninspiring career and if his father’s approach to discipline inescapably shaped his own.

The latter line of thought comes to a head when a doctor expresses her concern about Luke’s oddly frequent accidents (he fell down the stairs this time), forcing Paul to face the possibility that he’s abusive. Paul’s resultant introspection misses the mark by a bit: Instead of reconsidering his verbal tirades, he ponders whether he could be hurting his kids by subconsciously creating an environment rife with potential slips and trips and batterings. The series takes this sequence seriously, and initiates a compelling tonal shift from grim humor to pensive reflections on trauma and psychology. Though Paul and Ally face the risk of governmental intervention in their family, the predicament does little to change Paul’s parenting—an acknowledgment of the near impossibility of change, or of the way that one’s upbringing can permanently shape one’s inner circuitry.

With the abuse arc and other storylines, the series grows increasingly capacious over the five episodes made available to press. It moves from the clamorous frenzy of its opening scene—in which Paul goes on one of his most extreme and delightful screamologues—to more tender examinations of characters and relationships. Flashbacks begin to not only explore the myriad repercussions of childbirth, but also touch on quotidian interactions between Paul and Ally, and between each of them and their parents—the exact kinds of unexceptional moments in life that tend to linger when one’s memory stretches years into the past. In addition to lending a striking layer of poignancy to the series, these flashbacks add nuance to Paul’s and Ally’s inner lives. Despite Paul’s apparent lack of growth, he truly does try to be better, and despite Ally’s nonchalance, she does have fears and regrets and hang-ups.

This fleshing-out is crucial given Paul and Ally’s place at the core of Breeders. Their relationship is the show’s unifying thread, cutting through time and tone. The audience observes the couple in multiple phases and modes: blissful courtship, childbirth, acute grief, grief-induced horniness. Haggard and Freeman’s lightning-strike chemistry fuels their supersonic banter and warm, softer exchanges. Perhaps most charming are the instances in which Ally teases Paul, homing in on a deep and undeniable flaw, and Paul smiles in full recognition of how right she is, then and always. Such moments are reminders that these two could never really hurt each other—not even by damning themselves to parenthood.

Cast: Martin Freeman, Daisy Haggard, Michael McKean, Joanna Bacon, Alun Armstrong, Stella Gonet, George Wakeman, Jayda Eyles, Patrick Baladi, Tim Steed Network: FX

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Review: The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez Stokes Outrage but Fits a Predictable Mold

The Netflix miniseries suggests a sort of virtual, one-stop-shop Wikipedia page.




The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez
Photo: Netflix

Netflix’s The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez will stoke your outrage, and it should. The six-part limited series provides what feels like an expansive primer on one of the most horrific child abuse cases in the history of the United States, and there’s a sense that it wants to fill in gaps for those who might have been swept up by some other outrage shortly after eight-year-old Gabriel Fernandez’s death made national news in 2013, or just weren’t privy to the ins and outs of the case as reported by Los Angeles news outlets.

The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez suggests, like the recent Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez, a sort of virtual, one-stop-shop Wikipedia page about an infamous case, though it arguably goes further by indicting the faceless systemic forces that aligned in cruel harmony to crush a human life. At one point, the series even delves into the 2018 abuse case of Anthony Avalos, the 10-year-old Lancaster boy who was also tortured to death by his mother and boyfriend, to get at how the cracks in the child protective services system that cost Gabriel his life in nearby Palmdale were barely patched up in the five years following his death.

Gabriel died on May 24, 2013 after years of torture and abuse at the hands of his mother, Pearl Sinthia Fernandez, and her boyfriend, Isauro Aguirre. As detailed by various individuals, including Deputy District Attorney Jon Hatami, Pearl and Aguirre starved Gabriel, fed him cat litter, shot him with a B.B. gun, and burned him with cigarettes all over his body. They even bound and gagged him in a cubby. The series isn’t shy about providing us with photo evidence of that horrifying abuse, and it spends much time simply sitting with people and those photos, trying to fathom how a parent could do such things to a child. In one episode, Hatami opens up at length about his own abuse at the hands of his father, and in the moment, the prosecutor’s outrage in the courtroom is tinged with a wrenching melancholy, as if he’s fighting on behalf of a pain that he only recently came to understand.

The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez is at its strongest in such periods of reflection, when it’s trying to understand that which would appear to defy understanding. It lingers on the visible pain of those who came into Gabriel’s orbit, in life and in death, from those who tried to give him a chance at a happy life before he was placed in his mother’s care, to those who tried to report to police and the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) that he was being abused, to those who wanted justice for his torture and murder. Impressively, too, it makes space for interviews with a character witness who testified on Aguirre’s behalf and several jurors in his case, including the man who couldn’t initially bring himself to sentence Aguirre to death. The series has us grapple with questions of justice and morality, and there comes a point in the final episode where calling Aguirre “evil” feels as if it has no meaning given that the word can just as easily be applied to so many who turned their backs to Gabriel’s abuse.

Throughout The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez, you will know how responsible some of those individuals probably feel for the little boy’s death simply by their not having given interviews to the filmmakers. But those aren’t the only elisions here, and some aren’t so easy to rationalize. For one, the series never really gives a particularly concrete sense of who Aguirre was before he met Pearl, and after a while it feels as if the only systemic issues it cares to confront are those that prevented police and DCFS from properly responding to reports of Gabriel’s abuse. Though it mounts a strong case for why the boy and not his two older siblings were targets of their parents’ abuse, The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez doesn’t contend with the systemic social contexts that made Aguirre and Pearl’s violence an inevitability. And had it done so, the series might have reached the magisterial heights of Ezra Edelman’s O.J.: Made in America, which found new ground on the oft-reported case of O.J. Simpson by framing the fallen star’s life against the violence of L.A. and the ideals of a nation, its moral rot.

During Aguirre’s trial, Hatami argued that the man not only liked what he did to Gabriel, but that he did so because he perceived the boy to be gay, though the series tells the story of that perception in half-shades. From birth, Gabriel was raised for several years by his gay great-uncle, Michael Lemos Carranza, and his boyfriend, David Martinez, so we can intuit that the boy’s torture was at least in part an attempt at a correction. While Gabriel was in Pearl’s custody, someone reported that Michael molested the child, and it’s an allegation that journalist Melissa Chadburn states hasn’t been confirmed nor disproven. There’s a sense that no one in Gabriel’s family who had his best interests at heart seem to believe the allegation to be true, and while the series attests to the kindness Michael and David showed Gabriel, it does conspicuously glance past discussion of this matter, as well as the methods, legal and otherwise, by which the boy was able to land and remain in their care for so long.

Nor is mention made of Michael and David’s advocacy work as part of Gabriel’s Justice, or that Michael died of cancer in 2014. In San Salvador, the filmmakers interview an agonized David about what happened to Gabriel, and you may be frustrated by the missed opportunity to explore why and how David came to be deported by ICE and connect that to the other systemic forces of race and class that contributed to Gabriel’s death. There are times throughout the series where it’s difficult to tell if a story—like the one about Gabriel’s first-grade teacher posing with a noose alongside three other teachers—was swept under the rug because the filmmakers simply didn’t know how to incorporate it into the series or because it might have undermined the dominant narrative they’re seeking to put forth.

The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez, though, does find time for the sort of aesthetic bells and whistles that have become de rigueur for projects such as this since The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst, whose lurid reenactments could at least be justified because Andrew Jarecki’s entire project was to ascertain the exact nature of Durst’s crimes. But the uncomfortably ominous reenactments of this series—by and large suturing devices between interviews and courtroom footage—do nothing to enhance our understanding of the Gabriel Fernandez case. At times, they even work against what we already do know, such as the sight of the actor who plays Aguirre mostly from the neck down quaking in his cell with the sort of fear that’s never evident in Aguirre’s body as he sits still and silent in court.

But that’s nothing compared to the tactlessness of the show’s title sequence, which heavy-handedly literalizes the idea that Gabriel “fell through the cracks” before ending dramatically, distastefully with the sight of the cubby where he was imprisoned by his torturers. In such moments, when it’s trying to summon an aura of mystery—that there’s something here that’s waiting to be cracked open, something to be solved—it’s as if the desire of The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez to entertain, to ensure that we are as spellbound as possible by yet another example of the atrocities that humans are capable of, is greater than any need to inform and educate.

Network: Netflix

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Review: Netflix’s I Am Not Okay with This Mostly Transcends Its Familiar Concept

The series at its best when characters are hanging out, doing nothing, or struggling with feeling trapped.




I Am Not Okay with This
Photo: Netflix

Seventeen-year-old Sydney Novak (Sophia Lillis) has powers that she can’t quite control. In Netflix’s adaptation of Charles Forsman’s graphic novel I Am Not Okay with This, those powers become a metaphor for such stock things as mental illness, social discomfort, emotional repression, body changes, sexual discovery, and adolescence in general. Even putting aside the obvious superhero comparisons, there are other parallels, to Carrie and, in turn, Netflix’s own Stranger Things, which shares some producers with this series. But by focusing on the emotional turmoil deftly conveyed by its cast and leaning on a wicked sense of humor, I Am Not Okay with This mostly transcends its pat concept.

Some of the credit goes to Lillis, who spends much of the series glowering in the camera’s general direction. She’s expressive without ever losing that root of discontent and exasperation, as you can always see things like anxiety, bemusement, and concern poking through her disaffected exterior. Even before Sydney develops wayward telekinesis, she has a lot to contend with, such as her mother, Maggie (Kathleen Rose Perkins), having to work long hours at a diner in order to keep the lights on. Sydney is also infatuated with her best friend and only real confidante, Dina (Sofia Bryant), and the two have drifted apart as the latter has begun spending more time with her douchey boyfriend, Brad (Richard Ellis).

And so, Sydney starts hanging out with her eccentric neighbor and local weed dealer, Stan (Wyatt Olef), whose weird outfits and ever-pining ways recall Ducky from Pretty in Pink. But the show’s wry tone ends up closer to that of Heathers than that of the John Hughes classic: Though the ‘80s-teen-movie-plus-superpowers mash-up is almost certainly the intended hook for I Am Not Okay with This, what resonates most is its general sense of ennui. Sydney and Stan in particular are low-income kids in a town that’s far from well-to-do; when Maggie works late, she leaves enough money behind for Sydney and her little brother, Liam (Aidan Wojtak-Hissong), to subsist on convenience store hot dogs. Beyond have sex, do drugs, and listen to music, there’s little to do in this town but head to the school and listlessly watch the football games. For Sydney and Stan, their hometown is a trap that’s slowly snapping shut.

Forsman’s source material is quite bleak, with a spare style of simple character designs and roomy panels sprinkled with snappy, abrasive snippets of dialogue and narration. Though series creators Jonathan Entwistle (who also worked on another adaptation of a Forsman graphic novel, The End of the F***ing World) and Christy Hall depart significantly from the comic at times, they nevertheless maintain its feel, especially in those moments when characters are hanging out and leave so many things unspoken. Sydney’s surly narration moves things along at a wonderfully brisk pace that’s faithful to the original material. Of the seven episodes, most of them clock in at around 20 minutes; they leave plenty of space to suggest angst and disillusionment around the edges without simply wallowing in misery.

Unfortunately, I Am Not Okay with This is so good at establishing character and place that the rumblings of a larger plot feel extraneous. Sydney thinks somebody might be following her, and there are some lingering questions and mysteries meant to carry over into a future season. But the series never feels like it needs these threads; most of the moments where it sets up higher-stakes conflicts, particularly where Brad is concerned, sputter into silly romantic melodrama. It’s at its best when the characters are hanging out, doing nothing, or struggling with feeling trapped or bottling up what they want to say to each other. It’s disappointing to see the first season wrap up with an apparent attempt to chase the shadow of Stranger Things, as its atmosphere and rich characters are what set this otherwise familiar story apart.

Cast: Sophia Lillis, Wyatt Oleff, Sofia Bryant, Kathleen Rose Perkins, Richard Ellis, Aidan Wojtak-Hissong Network: Netflix

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Review: Amazon’s Hunters Blends Comedy and Violence to Diminishing Returns

The series is so ploddingly manufactured from familiar parts that it feels like it was spat out by an algorithm.




Photo: Christopher Saunders

Following a group of vigilantes in hot pursuit of Nazis living in 1977 New York, Amazon’s Hunters is so ploddingly manufactured from familiar parts that it feels like it was spat out by an algorithm. The show’s setting provides no shortage of bright, hokey Americana and ironic needle drops set to bloody violence. The late ‘70s is long enough ago to evoke nostalgia while simultaneously nodding toward our enduring obsessions, as the characters make reference to Star Wars and rarely shut up about various superheroes.

Comic store clerk Jonah Heidelbaum (Logan Lerman) has that most time-tested of motivations for seeking vengeance: avenging a dead woman. Unbeknownst to Jonah, his grandmother, Ruth (Jeannie Berlin), worked in a Nazi-hunting crew with her fellow Holocaust refugee, Meyer Offerman (Al Pacino). After Granny is mysteriously murdered, Jonah learns of her double life and joins up with Meyer’s ragtag band of vigilantes in pursuit of justice.

Meyer’s crew is a diverse bunch, made up of young and old alike. As the youngest, 19-year-old Jonah is considered something of a liability due to his inexperience, as well as his tendency to let his emotions run high. So begins the usual adjustment period for the proverbial hothead, in which he learns to fight while doing the expected bits of soul-searching once he discovers that killing people is, in fact, a messy business. More excruciatingly predictable flourishes follow: Somebody tells him relationships are baggage, someone else refers to Meyer’s group as “judge, jury, and executioner,” and an F.B.I. agent (Jerrika Hinton) naturally sniffs around, potentially mucking up the works of their well-oiled Nazi-hunting machine.

None of this is a jumping-off point for some complex meditation on vengeance, as the series largely consists of scenes of ironical Nazi comeuppance sandwiched between the sort of uninspired character drama where people wash blood off their hands while discussing the powers of good and evil. The show’s investigative segments are so obvious that they border on laughable, since the Nazis leave things like their medals and trophies of Jewish children’s teeth lying around (there’s even a jovial photo of one character hanging out with Adolf Hitler).

At certain points, Hunters seems like it’s trying to evoke the comparatively simple storytelling of early comic books or exploitation films of the ‘70s era like, say, Death Wish. Cutaways place the characters in fake movie trailers with superhero-esque names, using bursts of comedy and karmic violence to create a somewhat heightened tone. But the series never reconciles these rather sporadic moments of levity with its default mode of turgid drama, where Jonah broods about what he’s done or how he’s affecting the people closest to him.

Though the series doesn’t shy away from depicting how Nazis dehumanized Jews, it also feels the bizarre need to cartoonishly heighten those atrocities. In flashbacks, we see concentration camp prisoners forced to serve as literal pawns in a human chess game, stabbing one another to capture a “piece.” Another camp broadcasts a live singing contest over the speakers, with losers eliminated one by one. Where Inglourious Basterds and even the recent Wolfenstein games manage to ground their flights of fancy in unexpected sincerity and tragedy, Hunters traffics in insipid dramatic cliché. The result is by-the-numbers drama that veers every so often into baffling pulp, as though the series is cobbled together from mismatched parts.

Hunters clearly aims to be subversive and of the moment, but its every element feels so calculated as to be nauseatingly safe. Its villains are broadly acceptable targets, its moral conflict feels obligatory, and its forward-facing monologues about diversity seem designed only to mark off a checklist. The series makes the occasional gesture to present-day politics, as when one character incongruously name-checks “false news,” but it’s otherwise content merely to skim the surface of these parallels in service of an easily marketable premise. Though clearly gifted with more time and money than any of the exploitation films it references, Hunters has only a fraction of the things to say.

Cast: Logan Lerman, Al Pacino, Jerrika Hinton, Lena Olin, Saul Rubinek, Carol Kane, Josh Radnor, Greg Austin, Tiffany Boone, Louis Ozawa, Kate Mulvany, Dylan Baker, Jeannie Berlin Network: Amazon

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