4 out of 5

Created by: Sam Shaw

covers season 1

Period shows are generally gonna have niche appeal.  ‘Mad Men’ maybe gave us more of a taste for men in suits; much more recently, ‘Outlander’ has shown that a light swirling of sci-fi can do wonders when the period is set even further out.  ‘Manhattan’ isn’t explicitly sci-fi, but it does set itself up with an air of oddity right from the outset, with Dr. Frank Winter (John Hickey) contemplating some of the show’s forthcoming dilemmas amidst a mad, nighttime dust-storm cut through with the headlights of a car.  It’s an effective image – chaos surrounding logic, rays of clarity – that the series closes on as well, and that the series’ titles reflect.  We have our men in suits but the dapper ones are even more secretive than ‘Mad Men’s primary by default: they’re just one part of a group of scientists stationed in a makeshift New Mexico town working on The Manhattan Project.  There are guard stations; information is rationed.  Even the eggheads are separated into two teams with consequences for sharing information between them; Frank leads a ramshackle team working on an implosion model of the bomb, while Dr. Charlie Isaacs (Ashley Zukerman) is the bright-faced genius brought on to assist with the more championed, er, explosion model.  The stone-faced Professor Oppenheimer (Daniel London) occasionally floats through, running this bid to end the war like a businessman, and Mr. Fisher (Richard Schiff) slimes his way through to scare the bejesus out of anyone suspected of trading secrets.  The fake cheer of the town that’s lain atop secrets is mirrored in the relationships between Frank and his wife and Charlie and his wife.  The show keeps some who’s-sleeping-with-whom dramatics churning that occasionally distract, but it’s never overly manipulative or takes away from the backbone of sternness with which the show approaches its science and its characters’ struggles with the line between service to country and maintaining their own sanity and humanity.  While the show works with a rotating list of directors and writers, that same emotional blend of the dust-storm is maintained throughout via dialogue and production and direction, and we even get a smile or two or thankful feeling of accomplishment when there’s a dose of legitimate friendship to be had, or a breakthrough is scratched out on a chalkboard.  I normally find taking a factual account and drumming it into an episodic TV show to feel forced more often than not (like FX’s recent ‘Turn’), but WGN stumbled into a truly unique balance for the genre that makes it watchable whether you’re in it for the period or in it for the drama.