By: Brandon Wolfe
The pilot episode of ‘Tyrant’ was very flawed, but showed some promise. Its major pitfalls were a fairly unremarkable set of characters, a bland lead actor and an overreliance on silly melodrama, but its intriguing premise and lush production values seemed to merit giving it some time to find itself. However, its second episode, “State of Emergency” would seem to indicate that ‘Tyrant’ might not be on the path to pulling itself out of its tangle of problems. The characters remain uninteresting, the lead remains dull and, if anything, it doubles down on the melodrama. It doesn’t seem to be working out its flaws, but reveling in them.
In the aftermath of his accident, Jamal is on the road to recovery. We are told of the nature of his injuries, which will make every male member of the viewing audience squirm in his seat, but that he is on the mend. But while he is incapacitated, civil unrest is growing in Abuddin in the wake of all the recent dramatic developments among the Al-Fayeed family, and Nusrat, the new bride of Jamal’s son, Ahmed, is taken hostage at gunpoint by three young boys. Bassam/Barry, still highly resistant to having anything to do with affairs pertaining to his family, balks at getting involved in the standoff, but finally agrees to intercede at the behest of his forceful mother. Barry speaks with the boys and manages to resolve the conflict peacefully, but when the boys are apprehended, Barry’s uncle, a general in the military, orders all three young men to be abruptly executed. The scene where each of the boys is nonchalantly shot in the head is the only moment in “State of Emergency” that carries any charge. It’s shocking and brutal, and briefly jolts us out of the somnambulance that the rest of the episodes lulls us into.
“State of Emergency” doesn’t do a great deal to build upon its supporting characters. We learn that Leila, Jamal’s fiery wife, once had a love affair with Barry in their teenage years, a fact that will almost certainly be relevant in the weeks ahead. Barry’s family doesn’t advance much this week. Son Sammy is still circling a flirtatious relationship with Abdul, the son of the head of the Al-Fayeed security detail. Wife Molly is still asking her husband why he has such issues with his family, somehow remaining oblivious to the fact that his issues are both completely obvious and understandable based on who his family is. The key problem with the cast remains Adam Rayner as Barry, who is the black hole at the center of the show. Rayner is bland and inscrutable in a role that requires at least some evidence of life. Barry’s character does advance some this week, as he informs Jamal at the end of the episode that he now wants to be involved in the family, a turnabout that seems quite flimsily established. But perhaps Barry aligning himself more with his heritage will light a spark somewhere in Rayner’s performance.
A great nuisance of the series is how everyone in Abuddin speaks that sort of vaguely European-accented English that Hollywood uses to denote “foreign” rather than in their native tongue. This makes sense around Barry’s family, as they are American transplants completely ignorant of this new culture, but having Abuddin citizens conversing with each other in a language they obviously would not speak is a colossal cheat. I presume it’s being done to stave off what would otherwise be a very subtitle-driven series, which I take it the producers feel would alienate audiences unaccustomed to having to read during TV time, but it’s such a frustrating and distracting choice that it robs every scene of the already scarce amount of authenticity it’s has to begin with.
‘Tyrant’ continues to operate as a soapy melodrama, filled with heated, overcooked dialogue delivered with maximum emotion (though there is one moment of unintentional hilarity, when Leila exclaims to Jamal regarding his injury “You nearly un-manned yourself!”). It feels more like a Middle-Eastern-flavored spin on an ‘80s primetime sudser like ‘Dynasty’ or ‘Falcon Crest’ rather than anything that has something relevant to say about that corner of the world. You can credit this to executive producer Howard Gordon, a man with a documented history of trying to pass off triteness and cliché as profound television. Gordon sort of skirted by on ‘24’ because that show, while occasionally pretending it has something to say about the war on terror, is operationally just a Steven Seagal movie rendered as weekly episodic television. But ‘Tyrant’ has the opportunity to really explore the nature of a dictatorship from the inside out, yet it has little interest in anything authentic. It just wants to be a sexy drama that wears the clothes of something more substantial.
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