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TV Post-season Review (5): Prodigal Son
May. 9th, 2020 03:24 pmProdigal Son (available on Hulu and Sling TV)
The rich are different.
Is there a premise for a TV show more ripe for crappiness than "genius profiler whose father is a serial killer"? The abundance of cliches and scenes of turgid melodrama inherent in this premise would spread over a writers' room whiteboard like land mines, waiting to blow up almost any possible script.
So Prodigal Son, which dives into this premise with a freaking cannonball splash, is something of a minor miracle.
The key to the series' success is that it's not really a police drama. Oh, our genius profiler (Tom Payne) does solve baffling murders and reluctantly consults with his psychodaddy (Michael Sheen); but the show is geared more towards the family drama, and filled with off-kilter, dark humor.
Payne's Malcolm Bright is a shell-shocked weirdo, forced to manacle himself to his bed at night to keep him from wrecking his apartment with violent night terrors. (He's the scion of a wealthy family, handsome and brilliant, but you wouldn't want to change places with him in a million years.) His sister, Ainsley (Halston Sage) is a ruthlessly ambitious TV journalist, whose pursuit of a news story shades toward Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawlers; and their mother, Jessica (Bellamy Young) has spent the last 20 years metaphorically trapped in her mansion, vainly trying to dig out from the scandal of.... The Surgeon.
The source of all their misery is Martin Whitly (Sheen), and even 20 years after his imprisonment, he haunts his family like a frighteningly happy ghost. Whenever he's visited by one of his offspring, Martin is absolutely delighted; he's filled with cheer and witty jokes, and if his little wing of the psycho ward had grass, he'd be laying down a checkered blanket and setting up a family picnic. The contrast between his unforced bonhomie and occasional flashes of murderous rage are riveting every time we see him, and Sheen's brilliant performance anchors the series.
The police procedural part of the show is less entertaining, but it's also anchored by a father-son relationship: Lou Diamond Phillips plays Gil Arroyo, the NYC police lieutenant who hired Malcolm as a consultant when the FBI dumped him. Gil was the police officer who arrested Martin decades earlier, and he's taken Malcolm under his wing, hoping that his Major Crimes unit can give Malcolm some form of stability and an outlet for his talent. (The other members of the unit, Dani and JT, are mostly there to tell Malcolm that he's strange, but "we've got your back.")
[Gil also has a UST-laden non-flirtation going with Jessica that's actually kind of hot.]
Most of the season revolved around one of Malcolm's most traumatic childhood memories, when he found the body of a young woman folded into a box in his parents' basement. The search for the woman's identity spiraled into an ever-expanding investigation of Martin Whitly's poisonous influence, leading to a fellow serial killer, and eventually, another high society monster even more twisted than Martin himself. All during the season, Malcolm was confronted with his father's legacy, wondering if he was a narcissist and a monster like dear old dad. But in the final episode, he realized he was a caring and empathetic person like his mother, and his childhood traumas didn't have to define him anymore.
[Turns out, another member of the family carries on Martin's work perfectly well on her own...]
There's another aspect of Prodigal Son that I love, although it's never really developed during the season. With Martin and Nicholas Endicott (Dermot Mulroney) killing or ruining lives like they're free from the moral obligations of Little People, there's a not-so-hidden subtext that the rich men of America are a loosely-knit cabal of murderous psychopaths. For some reason, I find that idea enormously appealing and appropriate right now. For season 2, I would dearly love for the writers to dig into this idea--kind of like Succession, only re-imagined as a crime drama. It would be doubly delicious since Prodigal Son is broadcast on Rupert Murdoch's Fox network.
Season 1: B+
The rich are different.
Is there a premise for a TV show more ripe for crappiness than "genius profiler whose father is a serial killer"? The abundance of cliches and scenes of turgid melodrama inherent in this premise would spread over a writers' room whiteboard like land mines, waiting to blow up almost any possible script.
So Prodigal Son, which dives into this premise with a freaking cannonball splash, is something of a minor miracle.
The key to the series' success is that it's not really a police drama. Oh, our genius profiler (Tom Payne) does solve baffling murders and reluctantly consults with his psychodaddy (Michael Sheen); but the show is geared more towards the family drama, and filled with off-kilter, dark humor.
Payne's Malcolm Bright is a shell-shocked weirdo, forced to manacle himself to his bed at night to keep him from wrecking his apartment with violent night terrors. (He's the scion of a wealthy family, handsome and brilliant, but you wouldn't want to change places with him in a million years.) His sister, Ainsley (Halston Sage) is a ruthlessly ambitious TV journalist, whose pursuit of a news story shades toward Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawlers; and their mother, Jessica (Bellamy Young) has spent the last 20 years metaphorically trapped in her mansion, vainly trying to dig out from the scandal of.... The Surgeon.
The source of all their misery is Martin Whitly (Sheen), and even 20 years after his imprisonment, he haunts his family like a frighteningly happy ghost. Whenever he's visited by one of his offspring, Martin is absolutely delighted; he's filled with cheer and witty jokes, and if his little wing of the psycho ward had grass, he'd be laying down a checkered blanket and setting up a family picnic. The contrast between his unforced bonhomie and occasional flashes of murderous rage are riveting every time we see him, and Sheen's brilliant performance anchors the series.
The police procedural part of the show is less entertaining, but it's also anchored by a father-son relationship: Lou Diamond Phillips plays Gil Arroyo, the NYC police lieutenant who hired Malcolm as a consultant when the FBI dumped him. Gil was the police officer who arrested Martin decades earlier, and he's taken Malcolm under his wing, hoping that his Major Crimes unit can give Malcolm some form of stability and an outlet for his talent. (The other members of the unit, Dani and JT, are mostly there to tell Malcolm that he's strange, but "we've got your back.")
[Gil also has a UST-laden non-flirtation going with Jessica that's actually kind of hot.]
Most of the season revolved around one of Malcolm's most traumatic childhood memories, when he found the body of a young woman folded into a box in his parents' basement. The search for the woman's identity spiraled into an ever-expanding investigation of Martin Whitly's poisonous influence, leading to a fellow serial killer, and eventually, another high society monster even more twisted than Martin himself. All during the season, Malcolm was confronted with his father's legacy, wondering if he was a narcissist and a monster like dear old dad. But in the final episode, he realized he was a caring and empathetic person like his mother, and his childhood traumas didn't have to define him anymore.
[Turns out, another member of the family carries on Martin's work perfectly well on her own...]
There's another aspect of Prodigal Son that I love, although it's never really developed during the season. With Martin and Nicholas Endicott (Dermot Mulroney) killing or ruining lives like they're free from the moral obligations of Little People, there's a not-so-hidden subtext that the rich men of America are a loosely-knit cabal of murderous psychopaths. For some reason, I find that idea enormously appealing and appropriate right now. For season 2, I would dearly love for the writers to dig into this idea--kind of like Succession, only re-imagined as a crime drama. It would be doubly delicious since Prodigal Son is broadcast on Rupert Murdoch's Fox network.
Season 1: B+
