Is the new FX show worth your time?
Review by Brandon Wolfe
California-based pediatrician Bassam “Barry” Al-Fayeed (Adam Rayner) is feeling uneasy. He and his family have been invited to attend his nephew’s wedding and he hasn’t seen his relatives in many years. He is apprehensive about the impending family reunion and alludes to a rough upbringing. This seems like a perfectly relatable issue until you take into account that Bassam’s father is the president of the (fictional) war-torn Middle Eastern country of Abbudin and that those rough childhood memories include assassination attempts and street executions. Bassam’s reluctant homecoming is the catalyst of FX’s new series ‘Tyrant’ as he, his wife Molly (Jennifer Finnigan) and two teenage children, closeted son Sammy (Noah Silver) and dismissive daughter Emma (Anne Winters), make the trek to Abbudin. Molly, as all-American-blonde as is humanly possible, has grown weary of Bassam’s increasing distance and believes that confronting his past and his family will help him bury those skeletons once and for all. But even before departing, Bassam is forced to face his father’s power, as he is informed at the airport that all seats on their plane have been purchased so that the family will have it entirely to themselves. Bassam bristles at this. He wants nothing to do with any part of his family’s fortune. Upon arriving in Abbudin, he similarly shuns the decadent opulence of his family’s palace in favor of a quaint hotel, much to the chagrin of his bratty children. Bassam got out at 16 and never looked back. He doesn’t want to start looking now.
Bassam’s brother Jamal (Ashraf Barhom) represents everything Bassam never wanted to be. Indulgent and hair-trigger violent, he’s a frightening beast of a man, one who will beat a man half to death for having a familial connection to a potential enemy and then will forcibly check the “purity” of his future daughter-in-law to confirm that has never been with another man. Jamal is also next in line to the throne, a fact which becomes pertinent when the old man has a sudden stroke. On his deathbed, their father reveals to Bassam that he wishes that he, not Jamal, would be his successor. Rather than attend the funeral, Bassam senses a frightening sea change in the air and rounds up his family to return to L.A. But when Jamal drives his car off a cliff while drinking and forcing his female companion to gratify him, he finds himself near death and Bassam is forcibly removed from the plane. Abbudin needs a leader, after all.
‘Tyrant’ is produced by Howard Gordon, who also has a direct hand in both ‘24’ and ‘Homeland’. Clearly Middle East-related turmoil is the niche Gordon has carved out for himself, but this time he is examining the situation from the other side, showing us the nations and circumstances wherein extremists are created. But mostly, ‘Tyrant’ just wants to be ‘The Godfather’, with Bassam as Michael Corleone. The series will undoubtedly deal with how this “good son” will be corrupted by the seductive lure of power. It even tips its hand to its protagonist’s innate dark side with a flashback where young Bassam performs an execution after Jamal does not have the stomach to go through with it. Witnessing such a descent could be intriguing, but Rayner makes so little of an impression in this pilot episode that it’s difficult to get a read on the character. He is entirely bland, his uneasiness being his only real characteristic. If Bassam is going to evolve into a darker character, he needs to first become something more than simply a man who looks constipated.
‘Tyrant’ is a beautifully shot series. Everything looks striking and vibrant and the Abbudin vistas are quite breathtaking. This helps to mask the fact that the pilot episode sets up the series as a rather dour melodrama, one that’s a bit soapy around the edges. This is the kind of show where people get dramatically slapped across the face very frequently. Nobody really pops as a dimensional character. Only Jamal has any real spark to him, but his character is such a one-note monster that he comes off as much of a character type as everyone else. Still, ‘Tyrant’ is eminently watchable, and the conceit of this quintessential California family losing themselves to a far-flung nation’s promise of power and riches is a juicy one. ‘Tyrant’ may not be off to the strongest start, but its reign seems worth sticking with for at least a little while longer.
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