It's Been Awhile, but I'm back-ish on black-ish

 

I’ve been a huge fan of black-ish almost since the premiere. It was one of the most brilliant sitcoms of the 2010s as well as one of the most relevant series on network TV. The entire family of series, including the delightful grown-ish, have been favorites of mine for awhile. Unfortunately, during Season 3, This is Us premiered and has run against it for the past three years. I’m well aware that all this while I could’ve been streaming it, but I have a busy schedule and have mostly watched it in syndication over the past two years. Then, earlier this year, it was shifted to Wednesdays at 9:30 and I finally had to time to look at some brand new episodes. I’m happy to report it has lost none of its edge.

Like every other family in America (including, as I reported previously, the Pearsons) the Johnsons have been dealing with the pandemic and all its fallout for the last six months. Bow (Tracee Ellis Ross) has been struggling in her job as a doctor, and Dre (Anthony Anderson remains awesome) has been stuck in the limbo that everyone else has. Dre is still dealing with his ego – last week, he had to deal with the fact that he is not an essential worker, despite his own opinions – and all the other fallout of what’s going on. Junior is trying to figure out how to have a relationship, even though he can’t see his girlfriend, and the twins are now realizing they’re going to be stuck being home schooled for the indefinite future.

All of this resonates rather painfully in a more universal way. When Dre asks the twins why they haven’t been doing their schoolwork, they tell them it just doesn’t feel the same since their not actually at school, that they miss their friends, and the uncertainty makes them wonder if they’ll be in high school. There’s also the strain that this has been putting on Dre, as he tries to maintain his ego only to realize it can’t maintain it’s level.

It’s also, of course, really funny. The session at his company – now on the internet – are still painfully funny, as the subtle racism of his colleagues has become so much more obvious now. (The boss has now come just short of saying he’s working from a plantation.) And the writers can still find a way to make humor from the darkest of subjects. The Johnsons are watching a horror movie, and he collect their phones. Their phones then start buzzing and ringing, and Dre keeps telling them: “If it was serious, they’d call on the landline. The landline then rings, Dre cautiously picks it up – and it’s the twins grade school telling them they’ll be home for the remainder of the school year. He then lets out a perfect Wes Craven style yell.

Now, I’m well aware that over the past few years, there have been some critiques of black-ish and similar shows. Some have come from creator Kenya Barris himself, who earlier this year offered and even more meta-version of his life on Netflix with #blackAF. I still haven’t seen it, and given the decidedly mixed reviews, its not high on my list.  What I do know is that this has been one of the most amusing and conscious series that any show – much less a broadcast show – has dared to do in a very long time. Anderson and Ross are long overdue Emmys for their work, and I hope they finally get them. Am I the wrong person to make final judgments on its relevance? I don’t know. But it’s funny and its moving, and I’m glad to be watching regularly again.

My score: 4.25 stars.

This is Us Returns to the World We Lin: A Great Series Finally Faces Reality

 

After the scalding ending of This is Us fourth season, when nearly forty years of resentments between Kevin and Randall boiled over, it would be easy for the show to start right on in its new world. To its immense credit though, the writers decide to put the Pearsons in the reality we find ourselves facing. Kevin finds out Covid is about to become a pandemic a minute after he learns he’s going to be a father, Randall and Beth find themselves quarantining and that Tom Hanks has it, and Kevin tells Randall about his family situations just a few minutes before the news on George Floyd breaks.

Some might argue forcing real world drama on the immense level that the Pearsons deal with every week is too much to bear. I believe that it’s a very brave thing to do. People have probably been arguing ever since the series premiered that the Pearson family was just too much of an idealist one to be in. But now, Randall’s coming to terms with all of the issues that have made his life so hard, with the fact that he’s never been really comfortable expressing his feelings as a black man to the horrors that seem to go one throughout his world every day. It’s very telling that a five minute conversation he has with Déjà’s boyfriend (Asante Blackk) deals with the world we’ve been living in for the past few years than he’s had with Kevin or Kate or his parents for the entire run of the series. We soon realize his isolation from his siblings isn’t only due to Covid or the fight with Kevin. He’s unpacking forty years of baggage, and it gives Sterling Brown yet another level to tap after we thought he’d run out of them.

Kevin and Kate, in the meantime, are still dealing with their own reality which is, let’s face, tough enough. Kevin and Madison are slowly making their way towards becoming a couple, after a very frightening moment, and Toby and Kate are dealing with the idea they faced in the last minutes of the season finale – adopting a sibling for their blind son Jack. All of them are still dealing with the dementia that matriarch Rebecca (Mandy Moore is better than ever) has been dealing with for awhile. One of the few mercies is that we saw the scene that caused so much fright in a flashforward in 2019, and now it turns out it may just be a problem with a drug interaction. But the bigger problems are still there: when Randall is called after Kate panics, he’s unwilling to stay and celebrate their fortieth birthday, and he doesn’t really want to talk with Kate or Kevin yet – though there is a brief moment with Kevin that shows the slightest of movements towards peace.

And as always, we look back towards the past. Yesterday’s two part episode gave us yet another look at the day Rebecca went into labor and how Randall’s birth father end up giving him way after the most horrific of events. (Although, he should’ve stayed a little longer… but I’m not going to give it away.) The climax of the flashback came when both William and Jack came into the hospital chapel moments apart to give two completely different prayers – William constantly on the verge of breaking down; Jack violently angry towards God. If there is any justice, both Ron Cephas Jones and Milo Ventimiglia will receive Emmy nominations for that moment.

In the world that has been changed completely by a pandemic and so much more in the seven months between the end of one season and the beginning of another, television has been one of the few things to get us through an unprecedented difficult time. Some may want to return to This is Us as comfort food, and might not be welcome to see reality edging its ugly head in. Others, like me, will be glad to see that TV is reflecting this new reality so we don’t continue to remain in stasis. Everyone should be glad to see one of the best series on television in this era – or, for that matter, in any era – come back with new episodes. We need the Pearsons with all their flaws and sorrows.

My score: 4.75 stars.

Kidman's Back and David E. Kelley's Got Her: The Undoing is Another Limited Series Triumph for HBO

 

From the opening sequence of The Undoing, where pictures of a pretty young child with red hair playing in a field to ‘Dream a Little Dream of Me’ to the opening moments where we see Nicole Kidman in a huge loft apartment getting ready for work with her husband and young son, it’s easy to make the assumption that this is just going to be another Big Little Lies pastiche, set in New York instead of LA.  I have no doubt some critics will make the same jump, considering this is yet another adaptation of a best-seller turned into a limited series by David E. Kelley. They are clearly in the wrong.

Unlike Big Little Lies first season, which was split between multiple perspectives, The Undoing focuses entirely on Kidman’s character, Grace Fraser, a very successful therapist on the Upper West Side. Grace seems to have it all, a successful husband, Jonathan (Hugh Grant continuing his remarkable late career resurgence), a son who goes to a private school that you could only find in New York, and a woman well respected in her community. But right from the start, there are signs of problems, mostly focused on a young woman named Elena, who seems very comfortable with her own body and uncomfortable with everything else. We don’t understand how she fits in to this world, especially in a charity auction for the school (that admittedly, wouldn’t be out of place in Big Little Lies).

Then, the very next days, things turn dark. Elena is found murdered in her studio. Two detectives show up on Grace’s door, and they seem unusually intent on getting answers from her. Then Grace tries to reach her husband and can’t. Then she finds his cell phone still in their apartment. And after a series of calls, she finds that her husband is not where he says he is.

Unlike Big Little Lies (and this year’s Little Fires Everywhere) I actually read the novel The Undoing is based: You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz. So I know (or at least I think I do) where this story is going to do, and there’s a reason that Kelley was drawn to this material. It’s not a whodunit so much as a character study as this incident will reveal to Grace the utter falsity she has built her entire life on. We get some hints of it in the premier episode, and I give full credit to Grant for now creating a personality that seems perfectly likable but you can see something vaguely untrustworthy below the surface. You don’t want to buy it – Jonathan is a pediatric oncologist, which may be the hardest profession anyone could personally choose, and he’s clearly good at his job – but you can sense that there is something not quite right lurking below the surface. (On a different note, Kidman really doesn’t know how choose the right husband in these series.)

There are moments of pure satire in this to liven up the darkness – the auction is one of the most parodying scenes Kelley has ever written – and there are a lot of other great actors around. It’s good to see that Janel Moloney, who unlike most of her fellow West Wingers has been far less prolific, is back and in great form, though we’re still not sure how well Donald Sutherland will be used as Grace’s father. (Though I have few doubts; it’s Donald Sutherland, after all.) But I have a hunch that The Undoing is going to be a lot darker than Kelley’s previous work, not just because I read the source material, but because it seems right from the start far more unsettling.

I have no doubt the cynics out there will claim without watching more than a few minutes of The Undoing that’s it Emmy bait, pure and simple. It’s an HBO adaptation of best seller, Kelley adapted it for the network, Susanne Bier, best known for her work on The Night Manager, directed every episode, and Kidman, Grant and Sutherland are in the lead roles. It checks all the boxes.  Well, it’s only bait if the series works, and believe me the show works.

My score: 4.5 stars.

Dexter Retrospective on the Future: Part 2, How the show fell, died... and came back

 

Even nearly a decade  later, I’m still not sure just how the writers could have fallen so badly in the last three years of the series. If it were just the reversion of Dexter from family man to lone wolf, it would have been hard enough for the show to recover – any reference of Rita’s children who were vital in their own ways to the first four years was a major misstep. The fact that they spent the next three years dealing with killers which were generally far weaker than the ones in the first five years – usually surrounding them with horrible twists – was even worse. But what in my mind was the biggest blow was how the remainder of the cast of the series completely regressed as well.

I never understood why having spent two years building up the relationship of Angel and LaGuerta, they broke it off in one scene for no reason. Angel never recovered, and LaGuerta reverted to the cliché of full on bitch that had only been hinted at in the early years. Quinn spent the next three years up and down, becoming an alcoholic in Season 6, going into recovery, then completely forgetting it in Season 7, and finally just become an extra for the last year. The truly unforgivable sin, however, was what happened to Deb.

It was bad enough she spent most of Season 6 dealing with a promotion to lieutenant (misguided) and having incestuous feelings for her brother (creepy). But the straw that broke the series back was how she handled things when she finally learned her brother’s secret. Any aspect of her character that was enjoyable was completely submerged by the utter horror she felt holding on to this secret, which led to her act of killing LaGuerta, who had figured out her brother’s secret. The series could never justify it, and never tried.  She spent the last season working as  private eye, unable to carry a badge because of the guilt, and basically becoming an alcoholic herself. Even Jennifer Carpenter admitted she hated to have to play Debra those last few years.

And that was before the utterly horrible finale. In one of my biggest mistakes, I tried to justify that it was actually a fitting farewell for the series which in retrospect, it was universally loathed by critics and fans. It’s imdb rating is currently 4.6, which is only a little better than Game of Thrones controversial last episode. I would argue that Dexter’s was probably more disappointing, because even though the reviews of the series had been bad for awhile, there’s always hope that the last episode will redeem. If anything, the final episode amplified every problem. Debra, shot in the penultimate episode, but seeming on the verge of recovery, ended up in a vegetative state caused by the last and weakest of all the killers the show would produce. Dexter would kill him – in front of cameras- and endure no penalties. He would disconnect Deb from life support, and dump her in the water – untouched, unlike all his other victims. Then he would drive his boat into a hurricane. And then rather than try and have the presumed happy ending with fellow killer Hannah McKay in Brazil, he would abandon her and his young son for a life as a lumberjack. I don’t know if there was a way the writers could have ended the series by not satisfying any possible angle, but they seemed to miss every opportunity.

Or at least, that was the record showed – until Wednesday. When it was announced that Dexter would return for a ten-episode limited series.

Now as anyone whose read my column knows, I’m not a huge fan of the reboot/sequel. Usually it seems that the series that are brought back are inevitably series that seemed to wrap things up well. And to say there’s been a decidedly mixed response is the understatement of the Golden Age – for every Twin Peaks, there’s a Murphy Brown, for every Deadwood: The Movie, there’s a Prison Break.

Now the argument for a follow-up such as the one Dexter is getting is: the show was left open ended and it was popular. Left unsaid, of course, is the fact that this is the chance to fix a major mistake. The problem is – how?

Michael C. Hall will be back no doubt. The question is, what world would Dexter come back to?  Most of the other characters that made the series work – Rita, LaGuerta and of course, Deb are deceased. Mind you, Dexter has the habit of seeing dead people (his father Harry showed up as part of his subconscious for much of the series) but that would be far too much like Hall’s other major series (which did end perfectly)

More to the point, what would bring Dexter out of seclusion? A new kind of serial killer? Some kind of threat to his son, who he abandoned? Maybe someone figures out who he really is. But all of those sound way too much like another police procedural which involved killers far less subtle than Dexter’s.

Finally, and this critical, how do we end it? Everybody was pissed because Dexter didn’t get the right ending, but I have yet to see a consensus with what the right ending would be. Everybody tuned in week after week to see Dexter get away with murder, and when it ended with him doing just that, people were really upset.  Indeed, the fate that everybody seemed to want for Dexter was for him end up (if I may quote The Sopranos, a series whose famously ambiguous ending has not diminished its reputations) “Dead. Or in the can.” We say that would have been the perfect ending. But is it really worth just bringing Dexter back to trap him and kill him?

It is possible that I’m underestimating how Showtime can handle this. They did, after all, successfully revive Twin Peaks and their new edition of The L Word has been earning raves from fans and critics alike. And Showtime has been able to surprise more often than nearly any other cable network.

I’ll admit it I’m curious, and I’ll probably be one of the ones watching. But I have the suspicion that this revival of Dexter will end like the original series: a bloody mess.

‘

 

Dexter: A Retrospective Look to the Future, Part 1: What Made It So Killer

During the late spring and much of the summer, Showtime has been showing reruns of some of its most successful series: Shameless, Ray Donavan and House of Lies. However, I found myself drawn to a series that I had once considered one of the greatest series of all time, and also one of the biggest disappointments. I am talking about Dexter, which for many was considered Showtime’s official launch into Peak TV.  For obvious reasons, this became very relevant over the past week, and because much of the series greatest moments came during the period I wasn’t officially a critic, I thought now might be a good time to discuss the series. Its place in Showtime’s history, what made it so great at its peak, and where it inevitably crashed.

Up until 2006, Showtime was considered the poor cousin not just of HBO, but almost every other network on cable.  It had been in the original series market nearly as long as HBO, but many of it success stories were ones that basically were launched for a single demographic: Soul Food for African Americans, Resurrection Blvd for Latinos,  and a lot of Canadian Sci-fi that they would eventually release into syndication – Stargate SG-1 is the most obvious example. They kept make minor progress in the early years of the new millennium – Queer as Folk and The L Word were groundbreaking shows, Weeds was one of its most popular series, and it copped quite a few Emmy nominations and wins for Huff – but compared to FX, USA, and especially HBO, Showtime was never considered a place for great television.

Then in the fall of 2006, they launched a series based on a group of novels by Jeff Lindsay about a blood-spatter analyst for Miami Metro who spends his night stalking and killing other serial killers. And after Dexter debuted, its fairly safe to say that Showtime has never been the same since. It was the first series for Showtime that was both a popular and critical hit, it was nominated for Best Drama every year from 2007 to 2010, and received dozens of nominations, including five for Michael C. Hall in the title role. This made Showtime a true player in the Emmys – they would soon craft a series of dramedies centered around women with major issues – United States of Tara, Nurse Jackie and The Big C -  and some truly landmark series, most notably Homeland. It’s hard to imagine Ray Donavan or Shameless existing without Dexter to serve as the groundbreaker.

But what made Dexter work? Well, it wasn’t really the source material. The series stayed fairly close to the first novel in its initial season, but departed from it in a major way with the final episode of Season 1.  After that, most of the success of the series – and its failings –lay with creator James Manos and the people at Colleton.

 But truly, it’s hard to imagine the series working at all without Michael C. Hall. Hall had just gotten off a stint on the series Six Feet Under where he had played David Fisher, a gay man who had spent most of his adult life in the closet only to find that his family had known about it his entire life. Most of Hall’s work on Six Feet Under would focus on him repressing much of his emotions, so one can understand why he was an ideal choice to play Dexter Morgan, a man who spends his life putting up a false face to the world so that no one sees the monster lurking just below the surface.  The only people he ever seems to open up to our the audience in his often hysterical inner monologues and to the people he’s about to kill, when he can truly release his true self. It’s one of the great performances in television history that should have won a couple of Emmys – had the series not had the misfortune of being a near exact contemporary of another great series Breaking Bad. In many of my early reviews, I raged at how Cranston constantly robbed Hall of trophies – which was my greatest folly as a critic. That said, I think even Cranston wouldn’t have minded if one of his three consecutive prizes had gone to Hall.

But as I rewatched the first two seasons this year, it confirmed for me that Dexter was never just a one-man show. There were so many other great performances in the cast. Jennifer Carpenter, who played Dexter’s foster sister Debra, was marvelous, not just at utter profanity that would do Al Swearengen proud, but in showing growth from being a victim in the first season to showing great investigative prowess with each successive season, as well a true force for good.  Her desire to protect the people she loved – primarily Dexter, but also her fellow detectives and the people in her circle – was the greatest arc in the entire series. Of course, in the final two seasons, they basically shot it to hell – but we’ll get to that momentarily.

And a lot of the other actors could get beyond the range of their initial scope. Lauren Velez, who played Lt. Maria LaGuerta, started out as a career minded bitch who at the series peak would show great growth as a friend and as a lover as well as true humanity. David Zayas’ work as Angel, a detective going through a messy divorced, showed great patience as man reaching his nadir emotionally in Season 3 and becoming a more dignified friend. And Julie Benz’s work as Rita was one of the most complex performances in the series. Starting out as just a beard for Dexter, she became the equivalent of a battered angel, a woman trying to get through the nightmares of her past, her true devotion for her children, and her own secrets some of which were never shown.  It may not have been believable that she had no idea of her future husband’s secrets, but then he fooled a lot of people for a long time.

The guest cast was also very strong. Jimmy Smits gave one of his best performances as Miguel Prado in Season 3, a man who seems to be a hero corrupted by knowing Dexter, but in his own way has as much darkness as our lead. John Lithgow gave an Emmy-winning performance as Arthur Mitchell, the Trinity Killer, a murderer who seems to have hidden his secrets for thirty years, but whose own monstrosity is a lot closer to the surface. And I was always drawn to Johnny Lee Miller’s work as a man whose face as a motivational speaker hides the fact that he heads a cult, and that the murders of thirteen young women are actually the least unsettling thing about him.

This leads us indirectly to the problem that faces every series: when should it have ended? The universal belief is that the series peaked at the end of Season 4, when Dexter comes home having dispatched Trinity, looking forward to a happy life – only to find that Rita dead in the bathtub by Trinity’s hand, his baby son Harry lying in a pool of blood, the same way that Dexter was found by his father years ago. It was one of the great moments in television history – I considered it as much when I was ranking the 50 greatest episodes in the past twenty years, and TV Guide vindicated my selection on a similar list three years ago.

I have always been of the opinion that the show should’ve ended after the following season. The fifth season was the last truly great one the series had – certainly the Emmys thought so. The story of Dexter coping with the loss of his wife and adopted family with the help of Lumen, a woman as damaged as he is was well done, helped by a superb performance by Julia Stiles.  It also features the last real signs of emotional growth by almost every character in the series  - Joey Quinn being motivated by his love for Deb, Maria and Angel working through the early stages of their marriage, and Deb realizing that justice is not always best served by a badge. The season ends on the right note – Dexter helps Lumen achieve vengeance, but their fledgling romance is snuffed out by the fact that she no longer feels the same monster he does. It’s not at ending of hope – but then none of the previous seasons ended that way, either.

I think Showtime originally planned to end it then – I heard somewhere that Dexter was originally scheduled to run five seasons. But then, Showtime made the same mistake it would so many times – it followed the money. It resigned Hall for another three years. The series would never recover from this.

 

In the second part, I’ll deal with the fall and ending of Dexter…until now.

 

 

Funnier and More relevant than the first season:Better Late Than Never Ramy Season 2

 

I was so glad I actually got ahead of the game when watched the first season of Ramy a few months ago. An astonishing, often blisteringly funny show about a Muslim still living in New Jersey with his family, and not entirely happy with his faith or his life, Ramy spent much of Season 1 doing everything wrong: committing adultery, helping a wheelchair bound friend have sex with a teenager, going to Cairo looking for faith, and somehow having an affair with his cousin. When he returns to New Jersey in Season 2, he now can’t stop watching porn and is so desperate to save himself, he visits a completely different leader: a sheik. Somehow, he manages to make things worse for everybody in his path for enlightenment.

I must first comment on the exceptional, and deservedly Emmy nominated performance by Mahershala Ali as the sheik  Ali continues to reach new levels that not even his previous work on House of Cards and True Detective could prepare us: showing the patience of the saint that Ramy seems to think he is, and genuine humor in how he approaches everything, something that has Ramy baffled at every turn.  The problem is, Ramy tries so hard to follow the righteous path that he does what he does so much of the time and overcorrects. In the second episode, he tries to help a homeless man named Dennis that his friends tell him to avoid. We soon learn he’s an Iraqi vet with an extreme case of PTSD, but Ramy is so desperate to help him that he convinces the sheik to hire him to work at the mosque. Things seem to go well for awhile, but then Dennis insists on converting to Islam. During his ceremony, a group of protesters are outside. Ramy ignores the warning signs and within a few minutes, Dennis runs outdoors and beats one of the men into a coma – and everybody has their cell phones out.

In the next episode, everybody at the mosque is praying for the victim and only Ramy seems really uncomfortable. The victim’s brother is, if anything , just as bigoted as the group out there but that’s the least of Ramy’s problems. The sheik and Ramy then go to visit Dennis in prison where he tells him his concern for his dog. This leads to another trek for the poorest sections of the town, with the sheik and Ramy still trying to pull away. Then, in one of the most remarkable moments so far, while they are saying their evening prayers, they hear barking and find his car with the dog. But the sheik knows that Ramy has lied to him, and tells him to continue his training – with the dog.

You wouldn’t think a show that deals with such dark subject matter would still be blisteringly funny, but Ramy is. Ramy Youseff is clearly one of the great new talents to burst on the scene, and he manages to differentiate the way different Muslims see the world, even within his own family. When he asks questions about how the meal is prepared at a family dinner, his mother is hurt, and his father doesn’t understand why he’d rather undergo religious teaching than watch Shark Tank. His sister Dina is supportive – but that may be because she’s met the sheik and is obviously attracted to him. His friends are constantly dissuading him about how good a Muslim he should be, and it’s amazing the ways Ramy’s attempts to be better just end up backfiring spectacularly.

When I reviewed Ramy’s first season, I initially put forth the idea that despite almost every major character being Muslim, there was a universality to the show that I thought would appeal to everybody. It’s harder to make that argument having seen the entire first season and a good part of the second,  but I still think it holds up. Yes, there are very particular rules for how being a Muslim in America is, but it’s hard not to see the connections between the way so many Christians and Jews react to their beliefs – the ultra faithful and the ones who convert quickly. I have a feeling that a lot of the conversations that Ramy and his friends have about faith are talked about in different contexts involving many other religions – and in a way, that’s heartening to see on television too.

I was somewhat disappointed that both seasons of Ramy that aired were mostly shut out by the Emmys – though their were deserved nominations for Youseff and Ali. It was clearly one of the best comedies of the last year and deserved to be considered in the company of the eight shows that we’re nominated. I don’t know when the third season will premiere, but when it does, I will be waiting for it.

My score: 4.75 stars.

A Sly and Funny Look at the Man Who Fought Our Nation's Greatest Sin: The Good Lord Bird and John Brown

 

Ethan Hawke has been one of the best actors in American cinema for more than a quarter of a century. Yet somehow, he never seems to get his due. Perhaps that’s because he’s always so quiet, whether being the calm American in Richard Linklater’s incredible Before Sunrise trilogy or the father who fails his son but still earns his love in the remarkable Boyhood.  Even when he’s cast in big budget action movies like Assault on Precinct 13, The Three Musketeers or Training Day, he still seems to be the voice of reason. Which is why it’s remarkable to see him turn everything up to eleven playing John Brown in Showtime’s brilliant new limited series The Good Lord Bird.

Brown was one of the most divisive figures in what was America’s biggest crisis: slavery. During the 1850s, he led his family through Kansas, freeing enslaved blacks, killing the men who enslaved them and all who supported them. His raid on Harper’s Ferry is one of the cruxes on which our nation stands, and his execution was one of the causes of the Civil War. This is one of the darkest subjects to tell about, which is perhaps the reason the writer of the book James McBride chose to tell it as a comedy.

Advertisements for this series describe Hawke’s portrayal of Brown as ‘.44 Caliber Abolitionist’. They leave out something that is obvious from the moment we meet him: Brown is crazy, ‘nuttier than a squirrel turd’. Hawke is determined to eradicate slavery in Kansas when we meet him in the first episode, but it’s clear that he is at least partially round the bend, taking inanimate objects as signs from God, praying to the almighty before going into battle, screaming at anyone who he thinks gets in his way. It seems impossible that Brown could’ve fought as a soldier, much less led an army, but he goes in with such relish and survives such long odds that part of you does believe that God is looking out for him.

McBride understood that to try and explain Brown has been done by history. So he has it looked from the perspective of one of the slaves he ‘freed’. Henry is mistaken  for a girl by Brown the second he meets him, but Henry has learned very quickly that you never disagree with a white man, no matter how insane he is.  So he goes along, takes the name Onion, and wears a dress – something that he is fully willing to admit keeps him alive a lot longer.

Hawke is exceptional as Brown, showing him as someone righteous in his beliefs even though he is clearly delusional. But just as good is newcomer Joshua Caleb Johnson as Onion, who realizes very easily that the difference between being black in the north and black in the south barely matters a stitch to the black person.

You may think that I have described one of the darkest limited series in a very dark year. But it’s also very funny. That John Brown managed to succeed seems remarkable even to the men who fought under him, and much of the battles take place are so disorganized that you wonder how anyone could fight in such madness. Even the slaves themselves seem more detached from what’s going on, as the men claim they are fighting for them are clearly lost in their own ideas. They seem to actually think less of abolitionists than their masters. At least, they are forthright about why their fighting.

McBride and Hawke make it very clear that “This is a true story. Most of it actually happened” and unlike Fargo, which I reviewed last week, this time they’re being honest. We met Jeb Stuart in the first episode, and we know that Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglas are due to make appearances in this story. Whether historians will truly appreciate  a version of history as crazy as this, we can’t ignore the fact that it is just as relevant today.

My score: 4.5 stars.