Stream It Or Skip It: ‘A Man In Full’ On Netflix, Where Jeff Daniels Is An Atlanta Real Estate Magnate Who Loses Everything And Cunningly Rebuilds

We can’t seem to get enough of characters who strut and swagger their way through a show, leaving all of the other characters ground underneath their charisma and ballsiness. In a new Netflix series, Jeff Daniels takes on that swagger, and boy does he fit the part really well.

A MAN IN FULL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A man is sprawled out by the side of a bed. A voice says, “I don’t mean this as a criticism. Maybe I do. But when you die, will people notice?” The man’s philosophy? “End of the day? A man’s gotta shake his balls.”

The Gist: “TEN DAYS EARLIER.” Shania Twain is singing her greatest hits at the 60th birthday party for Charlie Croker (Jeff Daniels), one of Atlanta’s biggest real estate magnates. He’s reveling in the adulation, of course, walking around the party with his young wife Serena (Sarah Jones), and being insulting to Raymond Peepgrass (Tom Pelphrey), the representative of one of the main banks he works with. He also sees Joyce Newman (Lucy Liu), the closest friend of his ex-wife, Martha (Diane Lane). He semi-jokes that she’s there to check up on him.

Not there, at least not yet, is Roger White (Aml Ameen), Croker’s lead attorney. For some reason, his car is in the middle of a street party that he eventually gets out of.

After the party, as Charlie screws his wife up against a wall, Peepgrass goes to his thin-walled garden apartment and gets a call from Harry Zale (Bill Camp), a fixer for the bank who is ready to lay the hammer down on Croker for defaulting on the money the bank lent him. He asks Peepgrass for a tell that he’s got Croker squirming. The first thing is that his Southern drawl gets even more extreme. The second is that he starts sweating profusely, and he looks like, in Peepgrass’ words, he’s carrying “saddlebags” under each arm.

The next day, Zale does just that, inviting Corker to the bank to tell him that he owes them $800 million, and he needs to start paying it back pronto. Corker tries to push a business plan on Zale, saying it’s just a cash flow problem. But Zale is unmoved. With Peepgrass barely able to contain a chuckle, all of the tells he told Zale about come out. But Zale is just interested in the fact that Corker borrowed $800 million from his bank and hasn’t built a damn thing with it.

Croker immediately starts to devise his revenge and comeback. Meanwhile, Roger is still trying to figure out whether he still wants to work for Croker anymore. His wife Henrietta (Jerrika Hinton) doesn’t want him to rock the boat of their comfortable life. But when his friend, Mayor Wes Jordan (William Jackson Harper) calls him in to get dirt on his election opponent, a former buddy of Corker’s. Then when he goes back to his boss, Corker tells him they need to “fuck them”, them being the bank, in different bodily locations. When Roger says the conversation is inappropriate, Corker screams, “well, these are not appropriate times!”

Meanwhile, Peepgrass has to deal with a child support claim from a mail-order bride, and Corker’s executive assistant, Jill Hensley (Chanté Adams) asks her boss to help when her husband, Conrad (Jon Michael Hill), is arrested for assaulting an officer during a racially-charged police incident. Corker goes to Peepgrass’ apartment to threaten him to call off the bank’s pursuit of his loan default.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Written by David E. Kelley based on Tom Wolfe’s novel of the same name (Regina King and Thomas Schlamme direct the episodes), A Man In Full is more reminiscent of Kelley’s fast-talking network fare like Boston Legal or Ally McBeal — albeit with a lot more f-bombs — than his recent cable and streaming fare.

Our Take: If there is anyone who can pull off the highly dislikable, Foghorn Leghorn-sounding character like Charlie Croker, it’s Jeff Daniels. As cartoonish as his accent can sound at times, we see him “shaking his balls” from the minute we see him arrive at his birthday party.

This is a guy who lives it up, and who conducts business through insults and intimidation, but it might just all be for show. In fact, Croker is likely not all that much different from a certain former president, but for some reason Daniels gives him enough charisma to make us want to see how he gets out of this mess.

All that being said, though, A Man In Full has a lot of characters to address in six short (38-48 minute) episodes. Even if the perspective shifts a bit from episode to episode, we’re not sure how Kelley is going to bring all of these stories together. How will Charlie’s ex-wife Martha help or hinder his attempts at rebuilding? Will we see some follow-through on Jill and Conrad’s problem? And how about Roger? It seems like he’s being pulled from multiple sides to do things that he is not comfortable doing. How will that connect to Charlie’s attempted comeback?

It just feels like the show is actually setting itself up to be a multi-season series instead of the limited series Netflix says it is. There is no way all of these storylines can be given the proper attention in the time provided, which means that there’s a lot of potential for storylines to be dropped or resolved in a pat manner. Listen, Kelley has been doing this for almost 40 years, so maybe there’s a method to his madness. But we would have bought into a show about Charlie Corker getting his comeuppance and flailing his way back to relevance without any of the other stories that were introduced in the first episode.

Sex and Skin: We described the wall-sex scene. We get to see Daniels’ butt — or at least his body double’s butt.

Parting Shot: After he leaves Peepgrass’ apartment, Peepgrass eyes the knife he took out, thinking that his loud neighbors were coming over to attack him.

Sleeper Star: We’re just looking to see if Elementary co-stars Lucy Liu and John Michael Hill cross paths in a scene and briefly think they recognize each other. Probably won’t happen, but we can hope, right?

Most Pilot-y Line: The woman suing Peepgrass for child support says, “You put un-prophylact penis in my vagina, and you squirt desire. You feel shame.” Wow, that’s… descriptive.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Really, the only reason to watch A Man In Full is to see Daniels swagger his way through six episodes as Charlie Croker. The rest of the show has some fine actors, but we have no idea if they’ll get any kind of meaty stories in such a brief series.

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, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.