For all its merits, the Golden Age of TV has become a pretty oppressive place to live. Without knowing it, we’ve become walled in by millions of tortured dramas about troubled men driven to do terrible things, each striving to be more tortured and troubled and terrible than the last.
Tomorrow, for instance, Amazon will release Hand of God, a series about a mentally ill judge who decides to become a brutal vigilante following his son’s botched suicide attempt. Even if you really like dark dramas, that’s an incredibly dark jumping-off point; one that you’re unlikely to be able to manage without at least a couple of stiff drinks and a decent run-up.
So the news that Sneaky Pete has been granted a series order by Amazon is cause for celebration. Superficially, at least, there’s nothing to separate Sneaky Pete from its peers – it’s a drama about prisoners and gangsters and identity theft co-created by Bryan Cranston, the man who helped write the dark drama handbook. And yet, if the pilot was any indication, it’s likely to be just about the breeziest show around.
Sneaky Pete is a show that wears its drama lightly. It’s sleek and lively and brimming with smart dialogue. Crucially – although not unexpectedly, since it was developed for CBS – it feels like an old-fashioned American network show; like it doesn’t exist purely as a vessel for Vulture recaps and Emmy nominations. It’s filled with tropes and ideas that had long ago been sent to Coventry by the church of prestige drama.
There’s a hint of will-they-won’t-they romance, for example. There are cute kids, who seemingly aren’t there purely to act as a jackhammer visualisation of their parents’ cracked psyches. All-out serialisation has been jettisoned in favour of a case-of-the-week structure. And, most controversially of all, the protagonist played by Giovanni Ribisi actually looks like he’s going to become a better person as the series wears on. He’s not going to end up as a drug kingpin, or a fearful mobster, and he won’t get hacked to death by a quasi-medieval knight for burning his daughter at the stake. It’s early days yet, so forgive me if I’m wrong here, but there’s a fairly decent chance that someone might actually smile at some point. I know how crazy that sounds, but I’ve got hope.
This is a tightrope to walk, to be sure – by playing it too traditional in this lawless world of scripted drama, you run the risk of becoming Lou Avery to everyone else’s Don Draper – but Sneaky Pete might actually hint at the future of television. It’s a mainstream show, but one that’s been heavily informed by the glut of prestige drama.
Between Sneaky Pete and The Last Man on Earth, another show that’s taken the touchpoints of cable drama and worked them into a traditional sitcom, this might be the next stage of something. Right now, it feels like something that everyone will benefit from – the mainstream has been forced to become less complacent, and the prestige will learn to lighten up a little. And if that stops any more Hand Of Gods from being made, I’m all for it.
