IIt sounds fun to have the visionary puppeteer behind a beloved children’s TV show as a dad, but, well, you know what they say about cobbler’s kids. Vincent Anderson, one of Netflix’s strange crime dramas Is richof the two protagonists, is the creator of Good sunny dayThe Sesame Streetseries that encourages little ones to “be good, kind, brave, different”. The first sign that he has a dark side is that he is played by Benedict Cumberbatch, interpreter of tortured geniuses such as Vincent van Gogh and Alan Turing. The second is that while Vincent is able to turn his 9-year-old son Edgar’s (Ivan Morris Howe) everyday life into an adventure, he can also judge the boy mercilessly, holding him to impossibly high standards.
The morning after a particularly painful confrontation, busy fighting with his long-suffering wife (Gaby Hoffmann’s Cassie), Vincent instructs Edgar to walk to school alone. For one thing, it’s just a few blocks away; On the other hand, this is New York in the 80s and danger is everywhere. So, of course, Cassie panics when she receives the news that Edgar never showed up to class. She spends all day trying to contact Vincent with the terrible news, but he’s too busy waging war on the suits, demanding changes to his outfits. Good sunny day to call her back. It is only that night that the weight of his mistake falls on Vincent, who soon becomes obsessed with the idea that he can convince his son, who will probably be dead in a ditch, to return home by building Eric – a big blue monster. that Edgar is drawing – and putting it on TV. At the same time, Vincent begins hallucinating a rude, foul-mouthed, loving version of Eric, who orders him to “get it together.” Our hero is also an alcoholic with a history of mental illness.
That’s already a lot of premise and a lot of pathos for a single six-episode series. But it’s only the most peculiar half Is richan unfocused, inconsistently written and wonderfully acted show whose ambition is admirable and originality rare in an increasingly formulaic crime genre, even if creator Abi Morgan (The time) never manages to reconcile its tonal dissonance. What holds it all together, albeit like a plastic bag torn under the weight of its contents, is the parallel Morgan draws between an overpopulated world of bad parents and a patriarchy – which, in the city, encompasses the police, the real estate industry and the real estate sector. politics – which is rotting from the inside.
Is richThe other protagonist of is a resistant gear in this faulty machine. The NYPD detective assigned to Edgar’s case, Mikey Ledroit (McKinley Belcher III of Ozarks It is We own this city), was always an outsider in the force. Not only is he black, but he is also gay and closeted at work, spending hours caring for a partner (Mark Gillis) who is sick with AIDS, at a time when a diagnosis is the equivalent of a death sentence. He knows that the vice cops who hang out at Lux, a club not far from the Anderson home where Mikey is also a familiar face, are corrupt. And he’s frustrated by the lack of progress in tracking down Marlon (Bence Orere), a 14-year-old black boy who went missing and has since been forgotten by almost everyone except Mikey and Marlon’s persistent mother, Cecile (Adepero Oduye). It’s not lost on any of the characters that the media seems more eager to fuel the panic surrounding a missing white boy.
As Vincent embarks on his seemingly quixotic quest, Cassie – the only major female character, and whose vagueness is especially disappointing coming from the writer of Suffragist—seething with anger at her husband’s many failures, Mikey becomes convinced that Edgar and Marlon’s affairs are connected. Considering the early presence of city government officials and Vincent’s own father, Robert (John Doman), a real estate mogul whose son hates him for displacing homeless people to build luxury condos, it’s no surprise (although you might want to skip to the next paragraph if you’re ultrasensitive to spoilers), when racism, homophobia, and profit-motivated conspiracies run even deeper than he initially realizes. The metropolis of Good sunny day It’s a kind place where even the police puppet is friendly. But beyond that, Morgan sketches a veritable Manhattan governed by lascivious and destructive male appetites, from subway tunnels occupied by ad hoc communities of homeless people to office towers where the city’s most powerful residents impose their will on millions of people. fellow New Yorkers.
So it is appropriate that men in Is rich— who are, for better or worse, the only characters that really matter here — are all cruel parents, their damaged children, or both, even if the metaphor is elaborated as the series progresses. Already overloaded with storylines, psychological baggage, and sociopolitical resonance surrounding its protagonists, the show adds too many secondary characters to serve as its often unnecessary mirrors – self-hating gay men who represent alternative scenarios for Mikey, guys estranged from their parents or guilty for alienating his own boys.
Repetition is a poor substitute for cohesion; the puppeteer who literally fights a giant, confused, imaginary companion for control of his life rarely seems to inhabit the same universe as the righteous police officer who silently juggles oppressions. More successful than Morgan’s laudable but unsustainable effort to counterbalance a self-destructive white guy’s introspective odyssey with a broader social message is balance director Lucy Forbes (This is going to hurt, The end of the fucking world) and its stars clash between two very different great performances. Cumberbatch has the big, flashy role of a man coming apart at the seams, and he deftly endows Vincent with a softness that his prickly demeanor belies. Stoic in the face of equally daunting problems, Belcher’s Mikey maintains his rage – which only heightens the effect of his inevitable outburst. Both perpetrators and victims of the patriarchy, the mismatched pair help prove that when it comes to crime dramas, one ambitious mess is worth a dozen competent bores.
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
