The Old Man (FX/Hulu): TV Review
/THE OLD MAN - FX/HULU
SEASON ONE - 7 EPISODES
My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. Starts great but loses momentum and reveals itself to be a mediocrity.
The seven-episode first season of The OId Man, the FX series starring Academy Award winner Jeff Bridges, started out strong but came to a close last Thursday with a whimper.
The series, which originally aired on FX and is now available on Hulu, follows the exploits of Dan Chase (Bridges), a former CIA bad-ass now in retirement and hiding.
Chase’s hiding is unsuccessful though as the widower, who lives alone with his two dogs, discovers when an intruder breaks into his house, and this is no burglary, it’s a hit.
Apparently, Chase is wanted by just about everybody, from law enforcement to the intelligence community to terrorists and Afghan warlords, so he goes on the run.
Chase’s former intel handler, Harry Harper (John Lithgow), and his protégé Angela Adams (Alia Shawkat), are the ones who have to hunt down the aptly named Chase using a variety of black ops tough guys.
The first two episodes of The Old Man are, frankly, fantastic. The series sets itself up to be an action-thriller with Bridges as the aging but still brutally effective hero. There are some fight scenes in these early episodes that are brilliantly conceived and exquisitely executed, and are as good as anything we’ve seen on screen, big or small, in recent years.
It seemed with the first two episodes that The Old Man was going to be a rip-roaring, grisly and grounded action series, like a tv version of those Liam Neeson Taken movies or John Wick or something. But then everything comes to a stand-still as the series shifts away from action and toward a bevy of spy thriller twists and turns that aren’t particularly thrilling.
Some of these twists and turns are surprising but some, including the big one revealed in the finale, are painfully obvious from early on and fall rather flat dramatically.
Besides the action sequences, the other thing that made The Old Man so promising early on were the performances.
Jeff Bridges is, and always has been, a phenomenal actor despite having decided for some inexplicable reason to talk like his mouth was full of Snickers bars some years back. And Bridges’ work in The Old Man is as stellar as you’d expect it to be.
Despite being on in years, Bridges is still very lithe and makes for a truly believable bad-ass. He also brings a bevy of gravitas to his role and his character’s vibrant inner life is readily apparent as his eyes glisten with the intensity of a tiger on the prowl.
Also good is John Lithgow, an actor for which I’ve never had much use. Lithgow’s Harper is a battle-hardened bureaucrat who is skilled at political knife-fighting, but he’s also a family man reeling from the death of his son and grandson. Harper’s fragility is masked by his cold, calculating exterior, and Lithgow makes him into a captivating character.
Also very good is Ali Shawkat as Angela Adams, Harper’s protégé and de facto adopted daughter. Adams has all of Harper’s instincts for political maneuvering seemingly without the soft-under belly of familial sentimentality. Shawkat imbues Angela with a steely determination and a sly sense of superiority and the result is magnetic.
The problem with The Old Man though is that it sets itself up spectacularly in those first two episodes but then it loses focus as the story unwinds. As exposition and flash-backs replace action, the series loses momentum and drama, and my interest.
Side stories involving Amy Brenneman’s Zoe, a women Chase meets on the run, and flashbacks involving a young Chase in Afghanistan during the Soviet war in the 1980’s, drain the series of any power and immediacy because they simply don’t work well.
The expanding of the story from a lone man’s struggle to survive into an expansive journey about the past and all sorts of side characters that lack worth, is like releasing all the air out of a balloon, and by the season finale, you’re left with a rather flaccid and forgettable series that wasted all it had going for it.
It was announced this week that The Old Man will be back for a second season next year. I doubt anyone much cares. Considering how precipitously it declined in its first season, it seems very likely that this series will be just another in a cavalcade of uninspired and underwhelming shows available on various streaming services.
The Old Man could have been appointment viewing and one of the more notable tv ventures available nowadays, but the wheels came off the wagon and viewers were left stranded in a storytelling sandpit that seems uncomfortably like all the other sandpits they’ve been led into over the last few years of tv viewing.
In conclusion, The Old Man could’ve been great television, but it blew its opportunity, and now it’s just another piece of forgettable storytelling detritus adrift in an endless sea of tv mediocrity.
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