3 out of 5

Created by: Graham Gordy, Michael D. Fuller

covers season 1

Max Allan Collins is not my favorite writer, and the Quarry series hasn’t resulted in any particular favorite book of mine.  However, Collins is an incredibly skilled writer – I certainly enjoy his books – and those featuring Quarry that I’ve read are entertaining and well told, with a good sense of a lived-in world and grounded characters.  So for all of the shows that have been adapted from various detective / noir series over the years, would I vote for a show based on Collins’ troubled war-vet-turned-hitman?  Hands down absolutely.  Besides the fact that  a serialized tale about, essentially, a bad guy has made for some compelling TV – see The Sopranos or Breaking Bad – I’m not positive we’ve gotten one that sits squarely in the crime noir genre of Collins’.  That plus the expansive possibilities offered by the current long-game TV format (which Film Crit Hulk recently rallied against but which I feel offers more promise than not) means we could very well get a series that does right by the emotional complexities of such a character, and not something to hews too close to a hit-of-the-week format.

In its first season – though hopefully of several – Quarry still shows the potential to fulfill those possibilities, but the show creators have chosen to take the really long way ’round.  Which, to those of us who may be pre-invested in the character, is fine, and offers up incredible intensity in even the subtlest moments, but I’m worried it won’t be enough for those going in without the MAC bias, which leads us down a road of lower ratings and never seeing the full payoff…

But this isn’t fully a matter of “you should really give this show a chance because it’s fantastic!”; the core knife-twisting of the story of Logan Marshall-Green’s Mac “Quarry” Conway’s descent / embroilment into the world of paid hits is pitch black wonderful, with creepy characters, ghastly realistically messy crimes, and complicated relationships wrapped all about one another.  And fresh off some fantastic work on Banshee, director Greg Yaitanes gives the series a perfectly paranoid flair, peppered with his awesomely choreographed action sequences.  The cinematography and production design sell the sweaty 70s Memphis setting, and our primaries (besides Marshall-Green, Jodi Balfour as his wife, Joni, and Peter Mullan as job-organizer ‘The Broker’) are scripted and act out their flawed-human roles with watchable aplomb – though maybe The Broker’s gnarled Southern twang doesn’t too convincingly cover the actor’s Scottish accent, but his character is more about implication than what’s said, and that fully comes across.  However, this is all only a portion of the show.  We also have some missing money to deal with, and another Broker liaison (Buddy, played by Damon Herriman) we keep checking in on, as well as some police investigation loose ends tied to one of Quarry’s first hits.  While these pieces have their place and effect upon the story, they also feel wholly separate from our main plight to the extent that they could be occurring in a wholly separate world.  And a several episode stint where Quarry and wife or on the lam from some further reaches of The Broker’s world are, again, relevant, but at this point in the story, serve primarily a purpose of bringing Mac and Joni closer together, and there were probably less roundabout ways of doing that.  And exploring the further-reaching effects of Quarry’s hits might similarly be better served if and when it can be the main focus.   In other, way more concise words, the construction of Quarry is ponderous.

This is, tellingly, best summarized by the cold open of the first episode, which shows Quarry enacting some vengeance upon an unknown.  And sure, it sets a tone, but this scene – this character – literally have no context until the season’s conclusion, and that context doesn’t explain much of why the scene needed to be previewed in episode one.  Mac’s ability to kill is otherwise on display later in that same opening episode; previewing it only makes the outcome when it finally plays out inevitable, i.e. maybe not as much of punctuation of character evolution as it might otherwise have been.

Overall, I see the point: To give us the full scoop on how someone gets from A to Z, with Z being a contract killer.  And Quarry undeniably does this, and when were zeroed in on that path, it’s haunting and effective.  But – whether it’s dedication to the book, or TV padding – when the show tries to step off this path to dress up the world, it loses steam, and makes us question why we’re watching X when we care about Y.  However, the cost/benefit might end up being way worth it if we emerge into later seasons with all of our emotional baggage earned.  And I’m happy to wait for that outcome.  I just hope the slow and wandering setup allows other people to get on board as well.