2 out of 5

Created by: Steven Conrad, Bruce Terris

With Patriot, Steven Conrad’s previous show, he proved capable of reconfiguring the Coen brothers’ dry, darkly-humored tone – Fargo being a forevermore example – into something fresh and unique, a trick that the many fans of the writer / director duo have failed to do in the years since we were wowed by that film (and / or those before and after it…).  While Patriot’s antics were occasionally forced, and its poeticisms and stylization occasionally reaching, the series struck on a generally engaging balance between bloody tragic and ridiculousness, finding an appreciable humanity somewhere in the middle.  That might not sound glowing, but the earnestness of the approach absolutely stood out, making it one of the more notable shows of the last few years.

And so, with Perpetual Grace, LTD, Contrad seems to have decided to give that another go, jumping further into Coen territory with a full-on noir setup – PGL is, essentially, a crime gone wrong – and to double-down on his very particular patois that flattens out the discrepancy between the absurd and the emotional, with back-and-forth stage-like patter delivered slowly and without inflection.

The noir setup is good, and has potential to be great.  It sets up all the players interestingly, and throws in some early twists (exaggerated by that patois and delivery) that have us eager to see how things can deconstruct even further.  But then… it kinda sorta backs off.  And then… every single character starts talking in that same pattern, losing Patriot’s sounding board of occasionally ‘normal’ characters.  And late in to PGL’s first series, I realized something damning: that I didn’t really care how things resolved themselves, because I never got much sense that it mattered.

Jimmi Simpson plays James, a down on his luck, uh, fireman, who is roped in to participating in a con by fledgling magician weirdo Paul Allen Brown (Damon Herriman).  The swindle involves pesudo kidnapping Brown’s pseduo-cult-leading parents (Ben Kingsley and Jacki Weaver) out of their earnings, which involves a lovably over-complicated plan with a corrupt Mexican cop (Luis Guzmán), and as the show cuts inbetween black and white flashbacks and the present progress of the scam, we see the seeds of withheld information which are undoubtedly going to eff things up.

The start of this all is pretty gripping and great, setting us back in the off-kilter land of Patriot, with Simpson’s James acting as our more relatable point-of-view character.  He stands outside of that patter; he gives the show its humanity.  But when things go off the rails, Conrad can’t wait to throw some of his cronies from his previous show at us – Terry O’Quinn, Chris Conrad, Kurtwood Smith – and while they’re all great fun to see and have their own ridiculous arcs (that do crossover with the ‘main’ kidnapping storyline) there’s a sense that we’re just getting pushed further and further away from a finish line.  In noir, or even in Patriot, there’s a goal – commit a task, then escape – and everything that happens is as a result (or indirect result) of trying to achieve that goal.  But PGL instead seems to just stumble into its roadblocks, which are amusing in isolation, but feel scattered as a whole.  By further ‘flattening’ them with that flat dialogue delivery, it robs the show of emotional peaks and valleys; the randomness is more distracting than amusing.  Capping this off is an obsession with Kingsley’s character, which, again, is entertaining in theory – his zen rhetoric is peppered with frequent profanity and ridiculous proclamations – but the show really needs James as its keystone, and episode by episode that focus slips away.

The lower rating is due to what I mentioned above: when I realized I didn’t care.  Perpetual Grace, LTD is otherwise filled with fun performances (in context of the show’s style), quirky visuals and ideas, and isolated moments and concepts that are inspired.  An episode at a time, I was fine.  But stringing it together into a series, I found myself feeling ‘enough, I get it’ too often, with my attentions straying to watch something else.