Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
More than almost any other genre, the family drama brings with it the expectation of commenting on the American Moment of whatever time it’s being produced. And no TV creator has wrestled and wrangled with that more than Alan Ball. Leaving aside his grandly visceral True Blood — which had plenty to say about the American Moment, though not in the same way — Ball has written films and TV shows that have pulled back the placid surface of American families and revealed the scared, frustrated, neurotic, self-defeating, contradictory messes underneath. With Here and Now, his latest family drama for HBO that premieres on Sunday night, Ball presents a self-consciously diverse, liberal American family dealing with all of the things he’s always got families dealing with. It’s a show that, at least in its early going, stops just short of truly engaging with the thornier notions of its premise, but it’s also a show that holds some real promise if it can double down on what’s working and shore up what’s not.
The Premise
The Bayer-Boatwright family is an achingly liberal family living in Portland, Oregon. Mom Audrey (Holly Hunter) and dad Greg (Tim Robbins) met as idealistic young activists at Berkeley; she’s a former therapist while he’s a professor of philosophy. Their three adopted children — a daughter from Liberia, a son from Vietnam, and another son from Colombia, all adults now — were all chosen because they were from countries where America had intervened problematically. They also have a biological teenage daughter. The multi-ethnic nature of the family is a commentary in and of itself, and there’s the initial impulse to sneer at how self-consciously, almost patronizingly diverse it all is. Like when you watch The Family Stone and get to the deaf gay son with his black boyfriend. It’s empirically good and yet feels incredibly cloying.
To its credit, Here and Now has baked that very incredulity into the series. Eldest children Ashley and Duc openly bitch about being “advertisements for how progressive and evolved our parents were.” Their younger brother Ramon is from Colombia, yes, but he easily passes for white, and their parents treated him accordingly. And that’s not getting into their actually white teen sister.
It’s an Alan Ball family, so of course everybody is fucked up in their own way. Greg is having an affair with a student (who introduces him to cock-and-ball torture, which he reacts to so squarely it’s almost funny); Ashley and Duc are both professionally successful but privately bitter about almost everything; she takes her husband for granted and flirts with semi-strangers, while he can’t have sex because: reasons. Ramon, meanwhile, is gay and flirts with the cute barista and actually scores with him, which its own great American success story, but he’s also being haunted by visions — the number 11:11 recurs in progressively freakier apparitions — and is either falling into the grip of mental illness or receiving some kind of prophecy. It’s a sharp turn into surrealism for a series that set itself up as such a slice-of-liberal-life-in-Trump’s-America premise, but one that offers the hope of lyricism to what often threatens to be a mundane, feel-bad series of events.
What Works
- The Ramon character, first and foremost. Played by Daniel Zovatto, who you might remember from the excellent horror movie It Follows, Ramon is adrift but not some shithead. His siblings talk to other people about his passing-for-white privilege, and you can see why, but it’s hard to resent him. That there’s a gay lead character who tumbles into romance with ease and is dealing with a whole spectrum of stuff that does and doesn’t have to do with angst over his sexuality is genuinely forward-thinking and refreshing. Plus he’s got great chemistry with the barista guy and genuinely plays the middle-child with empathetic accuracy.
- The metaphysical stuff so far. You can easily see where Ramon’s hallucinations (premonitions?) would easily get bogged down in an eternal, vague “wait and see,” with Ball using the promise of big, mystical truths to keep his audience slogging through fairly thin family drama. But at the moment, the connections that Ramon is experiencing are intriguing. An enigmatic dream he has at the beginning of the pilot featuring a woman in distress gets connected to the therapist he sees after his hallucinations. Dr. Farid Shokrani has a framed photo of the woman in his office; it’s his mother.
- Holly Hunter as Audrey is doing a great job with an, as of the first few episodes, frustrating character. But she brings so much gravitas to the role, you’re willing to wait it out with her.
- Jerrika Hinton (who plays Ashley) was a fantastic part of the Grey’s Anatomy ensemble, and it’s a pleasure to watch her get to work with this cast.
What Doesn’t
- Tim Robbins is often a good actor, but the patriarch character, Greg, is like a grab-bag of Alan Ball patriarch cliches. The affair, the weeping impotently in his car, the disaffected way he drifts through his birthday party, his low-grade hostility towards his wife. He’s far less Richard Jenkins in Six Feet Under and a lot closer to Kevin Spacey in American Beauty. That’s not a compliment.
- I’m more willing than most to give difficult teens some leeway, but it’s really hard to latch onto Kristen (played by Sosie “daughter of Kevin and Kyra” Bacon) as she brats to her mother, spouts disaffected-teen mad libs to her brother, wanders a family party with a horse mask, and bangs the hell out of her sibling’s hot acquaintance. (Okay, that last part was pretty nice.)
- There’s a lot of potential to the identity politics of this family, but the show doesn’t quite get its hooks into it at the start. Is there something worth learning about ourselves from the way the Bayer-Boatwrights have chosen to conduct their family as a kind of activist pantomime? Or is Ball just sort of sneering at the end product of Baby Boomer skin-deep idealism?
What’s It Reminiscent Of?
So much! Obviously, the Alan Ball connection has us thinking American Beauty and Six Feet Under thoughts, and the comparisons are definitely there. With both of those series, Ball was investigating the changing American family of the turn of the 21st century. Specifically: crumbling masculinity, gay actualization, sex taboos, emergence of subjugated women. Here and Now obviously has a different mandate, and he’s looking into some next-level dynamics. Strangely enough, the show that it most reminds me of in its early going is the ABC series Brothers & Sisters from about 8 years ago. The well-meaning, overbearing liberal matriarch; the driven but spiky and not-super-likeable adult children; the front-loading of politics in topical and often frustratingly surface-y ways.
Is There Reason to Keep Watching
Yes, and here’s why: The Leftovers. That show also had frustrated beginnings that nobody really talks about anymore. We all remember how rapturous we were during its final season, but at the outset in season 1, there was major frustration at the disjointedness of the plots and the unlikeability of the characters. We hadn’t yet been clued in to what the show was trying to say. I’m not saying that Alan Ball has something up his sleeve that’s going to be as powerful and sublime as what The Leftovers became, but if it even ends up in the same ballpark, it’ll be work keeping a little faith.
