David E. Kelley’s good pulse with legal series is noticeable in All a manadaptation of the novel by Tom Wolfe (The bonfire of the vanities) in which he once again proposes a critical vision of the “high authorities” and their personal and work relationships, in this case with the story of a real estate magnate Charlie Croker (Jeff Daniels) harassed by a bank that demands that he settle his debt. The southern setting is key here: on the one hand, he helps Daniels have a blast with the accent and the cowboy hat, easily becoming the most memorable thing in the series. And on the other hand, he seems to emphasize the “cowboy” mentality of a group of male characters whose wounded ego serves as a drive and gives – never better said – a well-defined theme to the series.
However, despite how well Kelley articulates the dialogue and how accurate the actors are, some key aspects of the more than correct All a man They fall somewhat short. The miniseries is broken up into several subplots to offer a panoramic view of life in Atlanta, but despite Kelley’s good hand with the legal drama, there is some lack of context with certain situations and an adequate interaction between characters who, on paper, seem so strongly linked to each other. Although they all orbit around the figure of Croker, with Daniels erasing his good-natured image in one fell swoop (to later, to a certain extent, restore it), good actors like Diane Lane, Lucy Liu or Tom Pelphrey sometimes seem to drift adrift. waiting for a specific function in a series that, perhaps, is too choral. Almost as an exception to the norm, its short duration, just six chapters, does not allow them to do so.
Of course, and obeying the postulates of Wolfe’s novel, the series rewards by offering a broader social canvas in which the legendary screenwriter and television producer can discuss certain male clichés in a critical way but without being moralistic. On the contrary, some peculiar inversions (of gender, race, and social roles) suggest that, perhaps, we are entering into a richer and more nuanced discourse on terms as overused as “toxic masculinity” or the violence that comes off of it. The series, in that sense, is deliciously amoral without having to lack feelings for it.
In that way, in All a man the renegades can be the suspicious lower classes, a rich tycoon (no, no one names Trump in the series, but his shadow runs through it) demonstrates a humanity as great as his vanity, a woman may want to voluntarily give up to make a possible case visible. of abuse and a black mayor can be a big-time embezzler. Kelley, or Wolfe, use and have used this material to offer a wide range of ambivalent and gray ethical characterizations on burning social issues without deviating from the core story.
Where the series suffers is in a certain lack of context in the relationships between certain key characters and how all of these are “emptied” and related to the central figure of the series, Charlie Croker. Luckily, there are plenty of actors to make up for it: we have already talked about Daniels having a blast, but when Tom Pelphrey (by the way: an excellent actor present in a large number of streaming series) recounts the contempt suffered by his character at the hands of Croker, his look is one of absolute pain, making it unnecessary to emphasize further. That in the end everything seems somewhat vacuous, that the series cannot decide between excess or seriousness, perhaps this is one of the attractions of All a mana series that obviously does not reach the level of Succession but it is as easy to finish as it is to praise: to point out a certain change in current without giving the viewer the blame.
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