Monday, March 6, 2023

I Like The Company They Keep: Another Potentially Super Genre-Busting Show Led By Peak TV's Most Undervalued Leading Man

 

Quite a few of the most consistent actors throughout the era of Peak TV have been those who have managed to portray the everyman. They include just stand outs as Peter Krause and Joshua Jackson and to a certain extent, Dominic West and Martin Freeman, who can do it just as well with multiple accents.  In that mold one would have to consider Milo Ventimiglia, who is a slight outlier in this group in that he has worked in some of the greatest series on TV for more than two decades and almost never left broadcast television.

From his start as Jess Mariano, the bad boy so many people wanted to end up with Rory on Gilmore Girls to his stint as Peter Petrelli, the younger brother on Heroes to what would seem to be his role of a lifetime as Jack Pearson on the recently ended This is Us, in which he officially took the mantle of the TV father we all wish we had. Given that series ended less than six months ago, one would hardly blame Ventimiglia if he’d wanted to take a  couple of years off before his next project. Instead, it’s been less than six months and he’s back on television as Charlie Nicoletti on ABC’s The Company You Keep in a character that is both an amalgam of so many of the characters he’s played over the last twenty years and yet completely different.

Charlie is the son of a family of con artists. In the opening minutes of the pilot, they seem to have pulled off the con of a lifetime in which they managed to steal ten millions from an Irish criminal enterprise. Unfortunately for Charlie, the woman he was planning to marry ran off with the fortune – which is also bad for his family in so many ways.

What I find interesting about the Nicolettis is that, in many ways, they are pretty close to the Pearsons in their devotion to each other as well as having a similar moral compass. As we learn very quickly, the Nicoletti clan is as close to Robin Hood as you can possibly see – they only steal from those who have managed to gain their fortunes through illegal and criminal processes and they give much of their earnings back to the poor and the community at large. They are also loyal and protective of each other, through good times and bad. The writers have assembled some of the better actors throughout television in playing the Nicolettis. Birdie, Charlie’s sister and the mother of a deaf child (the series does a good job at showing them all remembering her every time she’s in the room) who has been famous for her work in Prison Break and The Walking Dead. Fran, the mother, is Polly Draper whose career in television stretches all the way back to thirty-something (she still looks great by the way). And the pater familias is that master craftsman William Fichtner, one of the greatest character actors in history, capable of doing drama and comedy so well that this role seems a natural for him. It is the father for whom the con was pulled – he is suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer’s though it’s still easy to hide for most people.

If the series had just focused on the Nicolettis and everything they did, it would be enough of a reason for me to watch. But the same day everything goes to hell for Charlie and his family, something goes just as wrong for Emma Hill (Catherine Heena Kim). Emma works for an analysis firm which is a cover for her job at the CIA. That day she finds out her fiancée has been cheating on her. She and Charlie are at the same bar nursing their broken hearts. Emma asks Charlie his job and he tells her he’s a yoga instructor. She tells him she’s a pageant queen turned rocket scientist. They spend the next hour getting drunk, and Emma says: “Tell me something true.” Utterly serious, Charlie tells her he’s a criminal. She tells him she’s CIA. They immediately laugh it off, but you get the feeling that the first time either’s been interested in the other.

Charlie goes to his hotel room, Emma follows him, they start making out… then they pause, watch movies, tease each other and fall asleep on the couch. When they wake up, then the crazy sex comes (and honestly it’s the most erotic sex I’ve seen on broadcast television in a very long time). They spend the next thirty six hours sharing more of their secrets (though not their biggest ones) before they go back to the real world. Then when the family’s  pulling their next con in DC, he happens to run into Emma.

Emma has family issues of her own. Her father was a Congressman but her mother was the power behind the throne and is now pushing her son to fill his father’s seat.  Emma is clearly the black sheep of her family, and not just because she’s never told them what they do. (In the second episode, she confides in her brother about her job, and it’s clear they have the same kind of relationship that Charlie and Birdie do.) Charlie decides that he wants more than a rebound, and Emma slowly becomes won over. What neither of them know is that both of them are dealing with the same problem in different ways.

In the pilot, the CIA managed to arrest Maguire and one of his capos, known as Daphne, managed to walk away clean. She then showed up at the Nicolettis bar, demanding repayment of their debt plus interest or she’d kill them all. (When Charlie asks what guarantee they wouldn’t be killed even if they paid it off in full, she didn’t even bother to offer one.) Emma has been pursue the Maguire clan in regard to fentanyl trafficking and is certain Daphne is involved.

This should come across as heavy-handed, another complication that will end with the two world’s colliding and indeed, there’s a scene in Daphne’s hotel room where that nearly does happen. But The Company You Keep is smarter than that, particularly as it shows that while Daphne is capable of outmaneuvering law enforcement, she has underestimated Charlie and his family’s capabilities. At the end of the second episode, the family realizes that Daphne is Maguire’s daughter and then try to use it in a subtle way. The next time Daphne shows up at the bar demanding payment and threatening to use Connor, the Maguire son, Charlie calmly offers to call him for her – and for the first time, Daphne retreats. By the end of the episode, the Nicolettis have the same measure of Daphne’s activities than the feds do, and anonymously inform Connor of it – and learn Daphne is hiding her identity from the Maguires. They have planted a flea in Connor’s ear that I lo0k forward to seeing pay off.

Considering all the balls that The Company You Keep has to keep in the air, I’m surprised that none have come even close to dropping. Indeed, the series is working on almost every level – as a romantic comedy, as a family drama, as a caper of the week drama, and as a psychological study. It’s inevitable that the truth about Emma and Charlie’s careers is going to come out, but it doesn’t seem like it would matter that much because you can see ways that the series could continue to work in either fashion. And I do admire the writers for not thinking the audience is stupid, like too many broadcast series do.

Last night’s cliffhanger came with Charlie being abducted and thrown in a truck. The teaser for the next episode showed him going through a polygraph. Now by this point in the series run, the viewer is pretty certain who’s giving the lie detector test and why, and because of how network TV works we know Charlie will emerge unscathed.  The tension therefore comes from what Charlie will think when it’s over – will he think this is a power move by a scared Daphne or the Maguire? Will he think that local law enforcement is catching up with his family at last? What will happen when he tells his family – the Nicolettis are honest with each other if nothing else? And will any of this cause them to fall suspicious of Emma? Last night, the Nicolettis met Emma and it went over well- but Birdie took some time to win over. She is by far the most protective of the family, so how will she react?

ABC has been on a hot streak the last year when it has come to producing both superb comedies (Abbott Elementary and the more recent Not Dead Yet) and masterful dramas (Will Trent and the just returned Alaska Daily). The Company You Keep is another fine continuation in this trend for the network. It’s well position for success on Sunday nights coming after American Idol and its competition on Sundays nights is fairly weak. Hopefully ABC will have confidence in this show and find out its worth keeping on the air. (Puns not intentional. Favorable review, is.)

My score: 4.5 stars.

No comments:

Post a Comment