This show is very good.
It has some good characters - I especially loved Buddy - shame I didn't see him a bit more (that scene where he was singing 'I cant live...' hahaha, I would have liked to have seen him do another job. There are some great dialogues, that right away, told me that this was a 'serious' show here (The Broker had some wonderful lines; the dialogues between Buddy and his mom). There was a soul to it, an intent, it was a meaningful show. In the slowest of the episodes (ep4 if I'm not mistaken), there was so much tension - it reminded me of No Country for Old Men.
Karl is also great.
The fact that the action scenes were well done
, yet they don't overdo them, instead focusing on the characters, the settings and dialogues (thus why many will feel some episodes are very slow) just underlines that the show creators wanted to build something more unique than just a straight up story about killing. But when they did do the killing part, they were perfect.
At the end of episode 3, when his wife escapes and Mac goes over there to pick her up, she goes to the car, but then returns to the house to give the dog water. That alone, right there, conquered me. The pool being so symbolic, the music, Munich Olympic Games, Spitz, Nixon, Segregation, so many details and topics that it touched. The music and cinematography are really top notch in this.
I loved the detail of him looking for a record.
I could point out some flaws, but they didn't really bother me that much. One obvious one is that I felt that Mac would have been much more under the eye of the law. It kind of felt they could just roam free, shoot and kill and weren't bothered by the police. With it only being 8 episodes, maybe it wasn't possible, but they could have developed more on how badly he was viewed by society because of the massacre in Vietnam. The segregation part could have been developed a bit more as well. But overall, nothing was bugging me enough to distract me from how good and enjoyable the show was.
I will have to check how much budget they had on this. But everything looked so polished and well done. We were in Memphis, 1972. Such great music and beautiful naked girls ah. And then of course - the finale - those scenes in Vietnam were really incredible. The way the show ended was perfect with us going back to the very opening scene in the first episode.
Drama, tension and mystery. The show wrapped up well. They can expand this world much more - I mean, just check out Tom Noonan. He doesn't speak. He doesn't have to and you want to know everything about him and this killer for hire organization:
Looking forward to season 2.
