TV Review: Prodigal Son (2019). Uneven and lazy writing squanders the potential of theme and cast.

Image courtesy of Fox

Tv Review: Prodigal Son (2019) by Ben Jeffries (26/9/2019)

Season 1 Episode 1 - Pilot (23/9/2019)

44 minutes

Drama, Crime, Psychological Thriller, Procedural,

Airing Mondays on Fox, then streaming on Hulu

Prodigal Son is too busy trying to wow audiences with flashy dream sequences and complicated pseudo-psychology to actually present a compelling story.

As a child, Malcolm Bright (Tom Payne) discovered that his father, Dr Martin Whitly (Michael Sheen) was the notorious serial killer known as “The Surgeon”. It was a brave young Malcolm who called the police to turn his father in, but rather than being angry, Malcolm’s father was forgiving as he was dragged away in handcuffs, telling the young boy, “I’ll always love you Malcolm, because we’re the same, you and I.” That idea has haunted Malcolm ever since, and he lives in constant fear of becoming his father. In an attempt to understand his father, and himself, the brilliant Malcolm would grow up to become a criminal profiler. He still has night terrors about his traumatic experiences as a child, dreams where he watches his younger self approach unsettlingly moving suitcases and his fathers face becomes his own, each sharing the same deranged smile. So it’s with more than a little trepidation that a grown Malcolm steps into his fathers prison cell to ask for help with solving a series of copycat murders based on The Surgeon’s grim work. There’s the kernel of a compelling idea at it’s core, but Prodigal Son is so concerned with displaying Malcolm’s wounded psyche, and in such a rush to get to what it obviously considers the “good” part of it’s story, that it rushes through this pilot episode taking little time to address the actual plot or establish a solid tone to work from.

The elevator pitch for this high concept crime procedural from Fox, created by Chris Fedak (Chuck, Deception) and Sam Sklaver (Deception, American Housewife), is essentially: A Hannibal Lecter type helps his Sherlock Holmes type son to solve murders from his prison cell, while the son grapples with his identity in the face of his fathers evil. There’s a version of this story that’s a dark and tense psychological thriller, but this is not it. Instead, this version is the one where, in an attempt to distance himself from his serial killer father, the central character choses a new name, deciding on Mal Bright, which is only slightly less on the nose than if he had been called Bad Goodman.

Prodigal Son makes attempts to be grim and gothic, with it’s muted colour scheme of blacks and browns, soft yellow lighting, and wintry exteriors, but outside of a few fake looking heads in jars, there’s nothing really creepy about the episode. It’s breezy sense of humour gives the show a campy vibe that competes with the idea of the tortured protagonist the show is so obviously in love with. After waking, screaming, from another night of sleeping in restraints and a mouth guard to protect against his nightly terror visions of his father, Malcolm looks happy and eager to start his day as he downs a handful of pills and recites an affirming mantra. There’s a disconnect between his damage and his persona. Supposedly Malcolm’s trouble sleeping is affecting his appearance, and everyone keeps telling him how exhausted he looks, but the show doesn’t have the decency to actually put any make up on actor Tom Payne to make him look tired, so the line starts to seem like a weird running joke about how neatly manicured the character is.

Prodigal Son is so busy trying to show the audience just how damaged and brilliant the protagonist is that it forgets to explain key details of the episodes plot. After being fired from the FBI in the opening minutes of the episode, Bright returns home to New York, where he finds work as a profiler with his old friend Gil Arroyo (Lou Diamond Phillips) at the NYPD. As Bright begins to investigate a series of killings, he realises something unsettling. They’re copycat murders, performed in the same manner as some of his fathers murders. At about two thirds of the way through the episode, Bright uncovers instructional diagrams of the killings that must have been drawn by his father, and he is forced to confront him for the first time in ten years. Dr Martin Whitly is kept in a single square room, and when Malcolm enters his father is wearing a cardigan and slippers and is chained to the wall. The room has been redecorated since Malcolm was last there, the only explanation offered a cryptic comment about what some “Saudi friends” were willing to pay for. Malcolm demands to know how this new killer got their hands on diagrams drawn by The Surgeon. His father’s response is “Oh, one of my patients must have stolen them” One of his patients? What patients? As Mal begins rifling through medical case files on his father’s desk, using his brilliant profiling skills to eliminate them one by one, the audience is still trying to understand the implications of the conversation. Is this fabled serial killer still, somehow, practicing surgical medicine? How? Under what circumstance? On whom? It’s a key piece of information on which the entire plot of the episode hangs and, between all the intense dream sequences and chirpy quips about murder, it’s never even obliquely addressed until that very second. It’s more than a simple plot hole, it’s a plot fracture that literally breaks the episode, making everything before it pointless and everything after it trite.

It’s easy to see what the show is aiming for with the episode. It’s placing all the pieces on the board and setting up all the dramatic furniture for the season going forward, but it’s all so rushed, spewed out onto the screen in a jumble of competing tones and boilerplate procedural plot that by the end it feels self defeating. We’re only marginally closer to understanding the show than if we had only seen a two minute trailer.

The episode isn’t a complete loss, there are a couple of fun moments to be had. The script is asking so much of Tom Payne in terms of charting Malcolm’s emotional journey that he seems to be playing three different characters throughout the episode, but at least he seems to be having fun in the role. The high point is when, faced with a hostage cuffed to a chair rigged with explosives and a quickly moving timer, Malcolm is forced to improvise in order to save the man’s life. The scene picks kicks the pace of the episode into high gear, and Payne gives Malcolm a kind of manic charge as he reaches for an axe. The energy of Payne’s performance in the scene is electric, driven by adrenaline and excitement with a subtle undercurrent that suggests maybe Malcolm’s thrill went beyond adrenaline and he actually enjoyed himself.

Bellamy Young is a lot of fun as Malcolm’s rich, New York socialite, mother Jessica Whitly, who’s maternal care consists of asking her maid to wipe down Malcolm’s sleeping restraints and a scale of sleeping aids which goes directly from chamomile tea to vintage Quaaludes. On the other hand, Lou Diamond Phillips is on autopilot as Malcolm’s old friend and boss Gil Arroyo, with little more to do than act as a fatherly presence. The two detectives who work under Gil are little more than cardboard cutouts, with Frank Harts as the tough Italian detective and Aurora Perrineau as the tough Latina detective. Halston Sage’s character, Malcolm’s younger sister Ainsley, has nothing to do and feels like a place holder for someone more interesting.

The relationship between Malcolm and his father
is a key element of Prodigal Son
Image: Fox

The key to whether Prodigal Son actually works or not going forward is the character of Malcolm’s father, Dr Martin Whitly, a demon in sheep’s clothing, who is played by the wonderful Michael Sheen. Whitly is presented as a smiling, bearded, portly older man who is chained to a wall because he’s supposed to be a serial killer. There are a few glimpses of the character’s darker side, with Sheen giving knowing looks and evil grins, but largely, the only reason the audience knows that the character is evil is because the show tells us that he is. Every time anyone says “The Surgeon” the room goes silent and everyone stares at Malcolm like he’s suddenly become a rabid dog, but there’s not a lot of detail for the audience to grab hold of. There’s never a body count ascribed to The Surgeon, there’s never a description of his killing methods, there’s no scene of him doing anything remotely scary. We only really know The Surgeon is scary because he has to be, because everyone is scared of him, even though we only ever see him as a sweet, bearded, duffer, for which Sheen is a perfect fit. At this point there are two things to look forward to with Prodigal Son, seeing Sheen get to play against type and really commit to the twisted nature of the character, and the possibility of the developing relationship between the father and son.

Pulpy genre playfulness can be a lot of fun when it’s done right, but that takes precision and restraint, and the pilot episode of Prodigal Son is done with neither. It shovels trope after trope onto the audience in the hope that narrative momentum and subtle twists on familiar scenes will keep an audiences attention as the show figures out how to get to the meat of it’s story, but without the attention to detail that’s needed to land such an ambitious premise. Hopefully this episode can be chalked up to a false start and the show has worked the majority of it’s clumsiness out of it’s system as it gets up and running, because there is the seed of a compelling show here, it just needs to be correctly nurtured before it can thrive.

5/10

Prodigal Son Stars: Tom Payne, Michael Sheen, Lou Diamond Phillips, Aurora Perrineau, Frank Harts, Bellamy Young, Halston Sage, Keiko Agena, Michael Cerveris

Created by: Chris Fedak, Sam Sklaver

Written by: Chris Fedak, Sam Sklaver

Directed by: Lee Toland Krieger

a Production from: Berlanti Productions, Warnern Bros. Television

Distributed by: Fox