Adam Lenhardt
Senior HTF Member
This is FX's latest hour-long drama. The showrunners will be Howard Gordon ("Homeland") and Craig Wright ("Dirty Sexy Money"), but the pilot was written by Gideon Raff (who wrote the Israeli series that "Homeland" was adapted from) and directed by David Yates (BBC's State of Play miniseries, the last four Harry Potter movies).It stars Adam Rayner as Bassam "Barry" Al-Fayeed, a pediatrician in Los Angeles who grew up as the younger son of the totalitarian dictator of a fictitious Middle Eastern country. He reluctantly returns home with his American wife and children for his nephew's wedding, as the unrest that toppled Mubarak in Egypt and continues to plague al-Assad in Syria is about to shake the foundations of his homeland.I found the concept intriguing, Rayner is phenomenal in the main role, but the execution severely lacking in some places. Barry's wife and son act with a level of naivete, stupidity and overall situational blindness that defies believability. Only Barry's daughter seems to recognize that they have entered a dangerous place with completely different cultural norms with passports and documentation that identify them as part of the most hated and feared family in the entire country.I listened with incredulity as the wife repeatedly insisted that Barry's relationship with his father be handled like any other troubled father-son relationship. I was absolutely floored by the suicidal stupidity with which the son put out feelers for a gay hookup in a country where homosexual acts can almost certainly get you imprisoned or killed. I pretty much threw in the towel when Barry's father died and the mother and son just couldn't understanding why he wanted to get the hell out of dodge as soon as humanly possible.Those two characters might be enough to keep me from coming back for future episodes. It's like having two Sansas from the first season of "Game of Thrones", but without the story justification of being a sheltered young girl.