Stream It Or Skip It: ‘McMafia’, An AMC Drama About A Banker Getting Sucked Into Franchising Murder

If it feels like AMC has been struggling to replace prestige, antihero classics like Breaking Bad and Mad Men, then you’ve been paying attention. Some shows have worked for awhile, but never got the buzz that those two shows did. With McMafia, the network hopes to become more than just the network of zombies. Will this get it back on the prestige map?

McMAFIA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A shot of a skyline resembling Dubai or Abu Dhabi, with a Mercedes driving down the highway. A middle-aged man is in the back. The text “The Arabian Penninsula” appears in the corner.

The Gist: Alex Godman (James Norton) is a banker in control of a well-regarded hedge fund with his name on it. He considers himself British, having been raised in London and schooled in England and the U.S. But his family are Russian Jews, organized crime kingpins who were exiled from their homeland decades ago. His father Dimitri (Aleksey Serebryakov) is mostly retired, but his uncle Boris (David Dencik) is still active, trying to wheedle his way back into the business interests his family left behind.

Alex, though, is on the up and up. Despite the Godman name being on his hedge fund, he takes pains to make sure his investments and his investors are free of Russian ties. But when a rumor starts circulating that the fund is indeed connected to Russia, investors start pulling out. He tries to get a businessman with an impeccable reputation to invest, but the businessman wants to buy into the company and take off the Godman name. He also talks to Semiyon Kleiman (David Strathairn), an Israeli mogul who knows Uncle Boris; Kleiman wants Alex to move money around in order to outmaneuver a rival mobster, Vadim Kalyagin (Merab Ninidze). Alex refuses.

He then finds out who spread the rumor: Uncle Boris. When he goes to confront his uncle, he’s in the room when Vadim’s thugs murder Boris, slicing his throat. With his fund failing and revenge on his mind, he has no choice but to go to Kleiman, who wants Alex to help him become the most successful crime organization in the world, essentially franchising the mafia like McDonald’s franchises burgers.

Our Take: McMafia is a British-American production which first aired on BBC One in January; it’s based on a non-fiction book about global crime syndicates, and it feels like a true-crime miniseries about the franchising of the mafia would have been a heck of a lot more interesting than this dirge.

Until Boris gets offed and Vadim’s thugs try to murder the rest of the Godman clan, not much happens in the pilot. It’s got the sheen of a sophisticated, prestige-cable drama, but it moves so slowly we found ourselves looking at the time during the 75-minute pilot (even though we were watching it on our DVR). To say the series is dour is an understatement; Norton doesn’t seem capable of cracking more than a stern frown, and it seems like the pilot was just one scene after another of Alex being ashamed of his Russian roots.

The performances are all fine otherwise; that’s what makes dramas like this attractive to begin with. But by the end of the pilot, we had no interest in seeing Alex get sucked into the mafia business. If we wanted to see that, we could just watch Al Pacino in The Godfather again.

Sex and Skin: In a club in Tel Aviv, one of Kleiman’s associates hits on Alex, but he wants no part of it.

Parting Shot: While meeting Vadim in Versailles, grovelling to him as the first step to helping Kleiman establish his dominance. Vadim shows Alex around and says “On the left is the Hall of Peace, on the right is the Hall of War. So, which one would you like to see?” Symbolism!

Sleeper Star: Juliet Rylance as Alex’s girlfriend Rebecca is intriguing, especially because she works for a hedge fund that promotes ethical business behavior and sharing the wealth with the poor.

Most Pilot-y Line: That last line is not only clunky in its symbolism, but one of the meekest endings of a pilot we’ve seen so far this year.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Unless you’re interested in seeing people click mice and move money around, McMafia feels like it’s going to be a pretty boring show without much action. Even if it picks up later on, we won’t be around to see it.

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 McMafia on AMC