Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Waco’ On Paramount Network, About The Standoff Between David Koresh And The Feds

No, you’re not on crazy pills. The reason that you’ve never heard of the Paramount Network before is that it didn’t exist; Viacom rebranded Spike with the Paramount name with the aim of making it a channel for prestige scripted programming. Its first attempt at that is the limited series Waco, about the feds’ standoff with David Koresh at the Branch Davidian compound 25 years ago. Is this docudrama compelling enough to relive the standoff?

WACO: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A scene of a flat desert road, where a convoy of trucks, trailers and black SUVs appears. Then a Black Hawk-style helicopter joins them. We soon see a shot of a building that’s an exact replica of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, TX. A man with long hair and aviator glasses sees the helicopter and caravan through a high window in the compound. A graphic appears that says “February 28, 1993”.

The Gist: This was the start of the stand-off between David Koresh (Taylor Kitsch) and federal authorities, mostly the FBI and ATF.

After Koresh busts out of the door and tells the feds not to shoot because there are women and children inside, we flash back nine months. Koresh wakes up next to his wife Rachel (Melissa Benoist) and his son Cyrus (Duncan Joiner) races him down the road leading to the compound. If we didn’t know that he was David Koresh, he would just seem like a normal Texas dad. But then he comes into a room for his morning sermon and starts talking about how everyone’s life wasn’t enough until they became a part of something bigger, and a viewer starts to realize why people followed him.

Meanwhile, the ATF and FBI are in the middle of the standoff with Randy Weaver in Ruby Ridge. FBI Negotiator Gary Noesner (Michael Shannon) is called to the site because the agency’s snipers have already taken out one of Weaver’s children and, he finds out later, his wife. Noesner is not in favor of the “militarization” of the bureau and is the kind of person who tells agents training to be negotiators to listen to the people they’re talking with, with the axiom that if they’re talking to an FBI negotiator, it’s already the worst day of that person’s life.

We find out here and there that Koresh impregnates the women that move into his compound, and when his friend Steve Schneider (Paul Sparks) finds out his wife is pregnant with David’s child, he almost moves out. One of the ways Koresh makes money is to play cover songs at local bars; there he befriends a drummer named David Thibodeau (Rory Culkin), and convinces him to stay at the compound. Six months later, with “Tibs” entrenched and liking a girl named Michelle (Julia Garner), Koresh tells him about how every man in the group is celibate in order to clear their minds. He takes on “the burden of sex,” and the children he “generates” will be the elders that determine our fate during end times.

After the botch job of Ruby Ridge, where the ATF takes the blame, the agency learns that there is a stockpile of weapons at the Branch Davidian compound, which sets things in motion for the confrontation.

Our Take: While the Waco standoff was 25 years ago, it feels like it was yesterday to us, so the basics of the incident are still fresh in many people’s minds. That’s the difficulty that the show’s executive producers, Drew Dowdle and John Erick Dowdle, were up against when adapting material from books by a Waco survivor and by the negotiator who dealt with Koresh during the 51-day standoff that ended with the feds storming the compound.

The angle they seem to be taking, at least if the first episode is any indication, is that while Koresh was a charming con man who impregnated minors and married women and ensnared dozens of people into his cult, there is a sympathetic angle to his portrayal. He’s not shown as a didactic nutcase; in fact, there’s a speech Schneider gives to Tibs about how he met Koresh that almost makes the man into a Scripture soothsayer. In the meantime, we see Noesner fighting against his style of law enforcement, foreshadowing how aggressive the FBI and ATF were at Waco.

As leads, Kitsch and Shannon are fascinating to watch. Kitsch is especially good at making people forget he played Taylor Riggins, becoming Koresh and making us believe the man was just that “regular guy” charming. Shannon, who usually plays angry and/or maniacal, is great as Noesner, who would rather use understated, nuanced means to get someone to surrender (he uses a known militia hero, for instance, to flush out Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge) than go in guns blazing. Those performances will likely keep us watching, but we’re not sure how well taking Koresh’s side is going to sit with us during the final five hours of the limited series.

Sex and Skin: Lots of kids and pregnancies, but no on-camera sex.

Parting Shot: Koresh and his son Cyrus runs out to the edge of the compound’s driveway, and he sees someone looking through the window of the abandoned house across the streeet. “Looks like we have new neighbors,” he says, somewhat suspiciously. The person looking through the window is Robert Rodriguez (John Leguizamo), the agent who infiltrates the cult.

Sleeper Star: Culkin is great as the somewhat suspicious but open-to-anything Tibs. Also, we’ve been on the Julia Garner bandwagon since Ozark, so anything she does here will be fantastic.

Most Pilot-y Line: The ATF director saying “It was our crappy case to begin with” about why Congress pinned Ruby Ridge on them. Just a bit of unsubtle foreshadowing how aggressive they were in Waco.

Our Call: Stream It. The performances are worth watching. But depending on your view of how Waco went down, you might want to take the miniseries with a huge boulder of salt.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Watch Waco on the Paramount Network