Better Late Than Never: Homecoming

Sam Esmail’s Mr. Robot is one of the great accomplishments of the New Golden Age. Incredibly well-written, superbly shot, and brilliantly acted, the series has been one of the most consistent and timely performers in the last five years. Esmail has managed to leap into the paranoia that has marked the internet these days, grasped on to the fascination of  shadowy organizations that The X-Files at it’s peak was able to play on, and had some of the most daring visual tricks that so far only Vince Gilligan and his merry band have been able to lay claim too. 

Amazon’s Homecoming plays so much like an Esmail project, it’s rather stunning to learn that he is only acting as the series director, and that the show was adapted from a critically acclaimed podcast from a couple of years back. It’s true that a lot of the series is audio-based – so much of it is based on conversations, therapy sessions, long telephone calls – yet in the three episodes I’ve watched so far, it’s impossible to imagine in it working in any other medium but visual. The brilliant cuts between wide-screen for the present and narrow for the future, the constant moving of the camera as it follows the character’s down staircases and through hallways, the startling visual cues – in the third episode, there a shot where a government investigator is looking through an endless warehouse of boxes, each marked with a Post-it with an X on it, waving his hand over an unseen source as a sole light fixture keeps going out. It reminded me of the shots that one sees in a Coen Brothers movie.

Of course, the main reason that everybody is fascinated with Amazon’s reimagining of this podcast is that it features Julia Roberts in her first series. She plays Heidi Bregmann, a therapist who in 2018 begins working for a corporation known as Homecoming. They seem to have the purpose of taking troops that have returned from oversea deployment, and reintegrating them to society. But there’s something just too plastic about everything we see, the smiles on the worker’s a little too sincere. Heidi seems to be legitimate, and her conversations with a soldier named Victor Cruz (Golden-Globe nominee Stephan James) seem to be trying to help him. But Victor’s closest friend, Shrier (Jeremy Allan White, a revelation to those who only know him from Shameless) thinks that things are wrong. He’s not convinced they’re even in Florida. And the conversations Heidi keeps having with her superior Colin (Bobby Cannavale) keep get more and more unsettling.

But it’s not until four years later that we know for certain something is rotten in Denmark. The investigator (Shea Whigham, demonstrating again why he is one of the most undervalued character actors today) comes to question Heidi, who is now working as a waitress in Tampa. When he brings up Homecoming, she can’t remember working there, and even though she’s had countless therapy sessions with Victor, she doesn’t remember him at all.

Amazon has done some remarkable piece of television since going into the original series business just six years ago. They’ve more than demonstrated that they are capable of turning out great and groundbreaking comedy (Transparent and Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.) Homecoming is by far their first great drama series.  It’s still not entirely perfect (it hasn’t found a real use for Sissy Spacek or Marianne Jean-Baptiste), but all of the actors are doing incredible work, especially Roberts, who reveals an inner darkness that all those years of romantic comedies never even seemed to hint at. (I feel there’s some kind of in-joke by having her ex-boyfriend portrayed by Dermot Mulroney; maybe this is what would have happened if My Best Friend’s Wedding had gone horribly wrong.). Every indication is that it’s going to be a player at this year’s Emmys, and it certainly deserves to be. It’s been renewed for Season2 already, but we may be in for a wait; Esmail is being trying to make sure the final season of Mr. Robot, due to come out in 2019 turns out just right. I’m more than willing to give him time. Esmail is clearly one of the new discoveries of this Golden Age, and you want him to make great TV. I just hope I remember this season by the time the next one comes out.

My score: 4.75 stars.