Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Looming Tower’ On Hulu, A Miniseries About How 9/11 Happened From The Feds’ Perspective

How did things go so wrong in the intelligence community that we either didn’t see the 9/11 attacks coming or could do nothing to stop them? That’s the premise behind the miniseries The Looming Tower, based on the nonfiction book about the lack of communication between the FBI and CIA. Does it communicate how bad things really were?

THE LOOMING TOWER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A motorcycle moving through a rusted-out factory in a Middle Eastern city. In the city, a book is passed from person to person until it gets to its destination, where someone takes a ZIP disk out of it, and puts it in a drive, right before the feds and military raid the place. The year is 1998.

The Gist: We flash to 2004, where FBI agent Ali Soufan (Tahar Rahim) is praying outside a conference room. He goes inside and tells the committee that lack of communication between the FBI and CIA is one of the big reasons why 9/11 happened.

Back to 1998: The ALEC division of the CIA, a counter-terrorism unit led by mercurial agent Martin Schmidt (Peter Sarsgaard), whose all-female staff calls him “professor.” When the FBI agents who are the liaisons between the ALEC group and the Bureau’s counterterrorism team, the I-49 Squad, approach the conference room, Schmidt shuts the door, closes the shades and says there’s nothing to see.

In a later security briefing with Richard Clarke (Michael Stuhlbarg) and I-49 head John O’Neill (Jeff Daniels), Schmidt says he has nothing to report, despite the fact that Osama bin Laden is going on ABC News and directly threatening the U.S. To Schmidt, any intelligence the FBI gets will just get ruined by their penchance to arrest people instead of gather intelligence.

O’Neill is sick of the ALEC division’s resistance to sharing information, something that’s mandated by presidential order. He decides to go on his own, getting any information on bin Laden (who they call “UBL”, initials for an alternate way to say the Al-Qaeda founder’s name) they can to get a warrant. He sends veteran agent Robert Chesney (Bill Camp) to Kenya to talk to someone who used to work for UBL. He gets an old computer that yields a picture of the brother of Al-Qaeda co-founder Ayman al-Zawahiri.

On that tip, Soufan goes to Albania to see if he can pick up al-Zawahiri. With the “sisters” (aka the ALEC squad’s muscle) they raid a known cell; the ALEC squad takes the prisoners to Cairo, leaving Soufan empty-handed.

We also see scenes of soldiers preparing for an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, where Chesney just left. The episode culminates in the attack on the embassies in Nairobi and Tanzania.

Our Take: This miniseries is based on the Lawrence Wright book of the same name, with Dan Futterman as the showrunner. Even though it’s based on real events and real characters, it’s hard to make something like this devolve into a third-rate episode from one of Homeland‘s early seasons. We’re not sure they succeeded after the first episode.

There’s no doubt about who the star of this show is: Daniels swaggers through the first episode as O’Neill, spewing expletives and saying things like “I could fuck you right now” to Chesney after he finds the info on the old computer. It almost feels like he made Will McAvoy from The Newsroom 20% ballsier and planted him in the FBI. The manhood-swinging in the first episode is sometimes a bit much to take, especially when we see that he has not one, but two mistresses: one in New York (played by Annie Parisse) and one in D.C. (Kate Finneran). Meanwhile we the wife and twin daughters he never sees are in the suburbs.

All we know about Schmidt is that he weirdly has that all-female staff who feels they’ve mind-melded with him; the FBI agents jokingly call them “The Manson Family,” while Schmidt calls the FBI agents “retards”. We do know that Chesney had a fling with what we think is a senior agent in the Kenya embassy who likely perished in the explosion. What all of these personal stories have to do with the lead-up to 9/11 is a mystery to us.

Meanwhile, the threat from Al-Qaeda and bin Laden is shunted in the background, just something that’s going on while the CIA and FBI conduct their pissing contest. It seems like examining some of what led UBL to radicalize and why he felt the need to attack American interests would have made for a more dynamic show. But that’s not the show we’re getting. We’re getting alpha males arguing over turf.

Sex and Skin: O’Neill has sex with his New York squeeze, but it’s all very chaste.

Parting Shot: O’Neill is on a late-night train back to New York when he hears about the embassy explosions. He calls Soufan at home and tells him to come to the office. “Now it begins,” he says.

Sleeper Star: Rahim is a top-lined star on this miniseries (right after Daniels), but he’s also the only one who’s not playing an affected version of someone from real life. He’s playing it straight for now, and we like that.

Most Pilot-y Line: “When I get my hands on that hard drive, and I will get my hands on it, I’ll shove that thingso far up your ass, you’ll be combing shit out of your pompous fucking beard.” — O’Neill’s threat to Schmidt if Americans get hurt because Schmidt withholds information.

Our Call: Stream It, but we’re on the fence. If this miniseries had come out 10 years ago it would have been fascinating. But years of terrorism shows has blunted the impact of this story, despite being based on real events.

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 The Looming Tower on Hulu