SHOW OF THE WEEK: The Old Man (June 16, 10 p.m., FX)
By all means, watch “The Old Man” to see a couple of esteemed senior actors who are still masters of their craft, but if you’re looking for a fresh take on the spy/action drama you won’t find it here.
Much of the enjoyment comes from seeing Jeff Bridges transform in the first episode from a crotchety widower who can’t sleep through the night without having to pee several times into a fugitive ex-CIA agent who can still engage in hand-to-hand combat with men many decades younger.
The other big star is John Lithgow as FBI boss Harold Harper. He’s helping hunt down former colleague Dan Chase (Bridges) after the latter kills an agent who tracked him to his Vermont home and goes rogue, although Harper has his own reasons for hoping Chase never gets found.
Why are the FBI and the CIA suddenly so interested in Chase? It has to do with an Afghan warlord named Faraz Hamzad who was betrayed by Chase three decades earlier, when Chase was in Afghanistan helping Faraz fight Soviet invaders, against the orders of his CIA superiors.
Why Chase was so interested in helping this particular warlord rout the Soviets to the detriment of his career is pretty murky. It’s also unclear why American intelligence services would be so keen on helping Hamzad enact revenge against a U.S. citizen and former colleague, at least in the four episodes made available for review.
Also along for the ride are Amy Brenneman as a love interest for Dan, who gets drawn into his flight from the feds on a rather flimsy pretext, and Alia Shawkat as an FBI protege of Harold’s. Israeli actors Hiam Abbass and Leem Lubany play older and younger versions of Dan’s beloved wife, Abbey, who dies of Huntington’s disease five years before the series begins.
But it’s the male characters who are very much driving the plot, with a concomitant body count. Apparently the only solutions available to Dan and his pursuers are violent ones.
The series, based on the novel by Thomas Perry, seems to want to say weighty things about the differences between heroes and villains, as evidenced by the speechifying dialogue, but characters’ motivations are not overly clear or nuanced.
There are some strenuous fight scenes — if Bridges shot any of those after he returned to set from battling both cancer and COVID-19, then wow — and each episode offers up a big twist, although I suspect you’ll see most if not all of them coming.
It’s a shame that Bridges, 72, and Lithgow, 76, don’t get to share scenes beyond a phone call in the first four episodes, although future episodes will feature at least one face-to-face meeting.
Overall, “The Old Man” is lesser than the sum of its parts, but Bridges and Lithgow are pretty terrific as two of those parts.
Short Takes
The Lake (June 17, Prime Video)
I only had time to screen one episode of this Amazon Canadian original, but I found it amusing and charming. It stars Jordan Gavaris (“Orphan Black”) as Justin, a gay man spending the summer with Billie (Madison Shamoun), the daughter he gave up for adoption after high school. He rents a cottage on the lake where his family spent all their summers before he had a falling out with his dad and left for Australia. To add to the awkward stew of painful memories, Billie not wanting to be there and Justin getting a crash course in parenting a teenager, he learns that the family cottage wasn’t sold as he believed but rather willed to his stepsister Maisy-May (Julia Stiles) by his father. So Justin starts scheming to get it back. The Northern Ontario-shot series also stars Terry Chen (“The Expanse,” “Jessica Jones”) as Maisy-May’s husband, Victor, and Jared Scott as their son, Killian.
Prime Video also has “The Summer I Turned Pretty” (June 17), a coming-of-age series from “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” author Jenny Han.
PHOTO CREDIT: Courtesy of Eagle Eye Drama
Hotel Portofino (June 19, 8 p.m., PBS/PBS Masterpiece Prime Video Channel)
The latest Masterpiece period drama takes us to the Italian Riviera in 1926 where
English expat Bella Ainsworth (Natascha McElhone, “Californication,” “Designated Survivor”) is running a charming hotel that caters mostly to other Brits, alongside her widowed daughter Alice (Olivia Morris) and spendthrift husband Cecil (Mark Umbers). The guests include demanding matriarch Lady Latchmere (the always wonderful Anna Chancellor) and her niece Melissa (Imogen King); Italian Count Albani (Daniele Pecci) and his son Roberto (Lorenzo Richelmy); American art dealer Jack Turner (Adam James) and his “wife” Claudine (Lily Frazer); medical student Anish Sangupta (Assad Zaman), who saved the life of Bella’s still traumatized son Lucian (Oliver Dench) in the First World War; faltering tennis pro Pelham Wingfield (Dominic Tighe) and his unhappy wife Lizzie (Bethane Cullinane); and snobby Julia Drummond-Ward (Lucy Akhurst), who’s there to marry her wallflower daughter Rose (Claude Scott-Mitchell) off to Lucian. I doubt it’s a spoiler to say there are romantic complications, particularly after new employee Constance (Louisa Binder) arrives from the north of England, but there are also political ones, with local Fascists ready to do violence to anyone who doesn’t support Mussolini and corrupt police supervisor Danioni (Pasquale Esposito) looking to line his pockets at Bella’s expense. Throw in art theft, marital discord, illicit liaisons both gay and straight, and there’s a little drama to liven up the beach excursions and glasses of Limoncello on the terrace. The setting is breathtakingly beautiful (although it was mainly shot in Croatia rather than Italy) and the characters, although not deeply sketched, grew beyond mere types in the four episodes I watched. In short, I’d recommend checking in.
Also, I’m thrilled to report that Season 8 of “Endeavour,” the prequel to beloved detective drama “Inspector Morse,” is finally here, debuting June 19 at 9 p.m. on PBS.
Odds and Ends
With apologies, it’s a light week for the Watchable list. I was on vacation last week and out of town so I did very little screening and some of what I wanted to watch wasn’t available, including the second season of musical comedy “Girls5eva” (June 16, 9 p.m., W Network/StackTV).
This week’s Netflix offerings include the anthology series “Web of Make Believe: Death, Lies and the Internet” (June 15), about the ways in which technology and crime intersect; the series “God’s Favorite Idiot” (June 15), in which creator Ben Falcone stars as a tech support worker who becomes a divine messenger, with Melissa McCarthy as his girlfriend; reality series “Iron Chef: Quest for an Iron Legend” (June 15); and the movie “Spiderhead” (June 17), starring Miles Teller and Chris Hemsworth.
Disney+ has Season 3 of the series “Love, Victor” (June 15), with gay teen Victor (Michael Cimino) sorting out his relationship issues and what he wants to do after high school.
Apple TV+ offers the film “Cha Cha Real Smooth” (June 17), which stars creator Cooper Raiff as a bar mitzvah host who strikes up a friendship with a mother (Dakota Johnson) and her autistic daughter (Vanessa Burghardt).
Finally, CTV Comedy Channel has Season 2 of the comedy series “Roast Battle Canada” (June 13, 10:30 p.m.) with judges Russell Peters, K. Trevor Wilson and Sabrina Jalees, and host Ennis Esmer.
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