It gives the tone of this series a less fraught feeling than one might get with a city-centric murder mystery, and it certainly makes the narrative more character-centric, but their daily wanderings can be pretty boring. Much like Futterman did with his Foxcatcher script, he’s obviously trying to capture that laconic PA vibe, only this time dialing into any number of sleepy, mostly abandoned towns that make up America’s Rust belt. While the framework sounds like it has all the makings of a twisty murder mystery, American Rust has a maddeningly peculiar way of downplaying just about everything, so there’s no urgency in the three episodes provided to critics. Despite only circumstantial evidence, the discovery prompts Harris to protect Billy once more, but the stakes to cover up what Billy might have done are even higher this time. That creates unfinished business between the ex-cop and Billy that eventually results in a bludgeoned body in an abandoned steel mill.
However, the cop who arrests Billy, Novick, happens to be a ne’er-do-well junkie who Harris finally fires on the spot that night because of his extreme behavior.
Because Harris is sweet on Billy’s mom, he pulls some favors to get the kid six months of parole. It’s Billy’s fight with a townie that happens six months prior to the discovered body in the pilot that lays the groundwork for all the messy drama to come. And their son is former football star Billy Poe (Alex Neustaedter), a recent high school graduate floundering about what to do next because of his family’s poverty and lack of opportunity in this financially depressed area. Grace Poe (Maura Tierney) is a local dressmaker, married to but separated from the town cad, Virgil (Mark Pellegrino). Chief Harris is revealed to be a war vet and a former Pittsburgh detective slowly weaning himself off prescription drugs for pain and PTSD. The series transfers over the main characters and basic plots of Meyer’s novel, but writer Dan Futterman ( Foxcatcher) wrestles the book’s narrative into more of an ensemble piece that spools outwards from a murder introduced, rather oddly, in the pilot episode.įollowing the trend of so many scripted television dramas these days, the series feels the need to open in the “now” of 2015 before jumping back in time a mere six months in order to set up the various players in town, all leading towards the murder. Located in the rural southwest of the state, it’s the kind of town that Chief Del likes to clarify to an outsider is closer to West Virginia-and its sensibilities-than that of closest big city, Pittsburgh. There are documentaries galore and, on the scripted side, there’s the upcoming Dopesick (Hulu), Painkiller (Netflix), as well as Showtime’s new series American Rust.Īn adaptation of first-time author Philipp Meyer’s book of the same name, the nine-episode American Rust stars Jeff Daniels as Chief Del Harris, who’s keeping the peace in the fictional town of Buell in Fayette County, Pennsylvania. But the show tends to lean on unhappiness as a goal in itself, and no one here is unhappier than Harris.Networks have been serving up a lot of opioid crisis-related programming lately. Bill Camp shows up, too, playing a character whose abject misery lacks, in the first three episodes, shading or dimension.
Tierney, able as ever, plays a part in a storyline about workplace unionization that is well-intentioned and that is made to feel entirely tangential to the main action of the show, while Neustaedter is playing an idea about wayward young people. But in the absence of compelling texture or grain about the environment around him, Harris and his dilemma take over a show that seems to want to be about the grand sweep of recent American history. Daniels’ recent characters have a certainty that they’re doing the right thing, carried across with an irritating, and irritated, impatience that every other character isn’t on board.Īnd his Harris is grouchier and glummer even than Daniels tends to be, if every bit as reliant on snarky comebacks to those the character holds in contempt. His being contracted to play James Comey in Showtime’s “The Comey Rule” came as little surprise, relying as it did on Daniels’ facility with aggrievement at moral lessers in service of a higher truth. His every utterance was an appeal to higher virtues that, thanks to the character’s superior air, ended up not feeling very appealing at all. His character on HBO’s “The Newsroom,” which aired from 2012 to 2014, existed in a perpetual state of puffed-up indignation over American decline. Daniels has, in recent years, had a second career of sorts playing variations on Will McAvoy.
0 kommentar(er)
