You're not going to want to blow the job interview, believe me

Continuing my trip down The Guardian's Top 50 TV Shows of 2022.  

#37 : Black Bird

The creepiest character of the year rubbed up against the most charming in this tense prison thriller. Taron Egerton played suave con Jimmy Keene, who was deemed so affable by the FBI that he was offered a reduced sentence to head into a maximum security psychiatric unit and try to extract a confession by Larry Hall (Paul Walter Hauser) for the killing of multiple girls. Though it sounded far-fetched, the two-handers were horrifying, affecting – and made all the more disturbing by the fact that it is based on a true story.

I've heard this is good and I've got a bit of a soft spot for Taron Egerton - after all, he is the voice of Moomintroll (which is well worth a watch if you've not seen it).  And I guess he does a reasonable job in Rocketman as well - I do hope I'm going to get to write about that some day.  So I'm looking forward to this...

Jimmy Keene (Taron Egerton) is indeed very suave and Larry Hall (Paul Walter Hauser) is very much not suave - they make an interesting pairing.  The first couple of episodes do the dance of Jimmy getting the job of working on Larry whilst also giving us the backstory on the murders that they're trying to connect to Larry - the series does an excellent job in ratcheting up the tension even before things get anywhere near actually tense.  But it really all comes to a head when Jimmy & Larry get together and you have no idea how things are going to end - they're both very interesting characters.  And I think that's pretty much all you need to know.

Taron Egerton is, as expected, excellent - he's really very good indeed and shows a great combination of cockiness and vulnerability, having to show us that he's thinking on his feet without showing us too obviously.  Paul Walter Hauser is also excellent but in a very different way - he inhabits a very strange place and, boy, does he inhabit it (and he also has a very strange voice!).  As The Guardian says, their two-handers were very affecting and very well written (they're certainly not rushed - episode 4 in particular really takes its time) but a lot of Jimmy's scenes are written as two-handers - with his dad, the warden, his handler, his psychiatrists, pretty much everyone - and they're all well done.

Sepideh Moafi is excellent as Lauren McCauley, Jimmy's very intense FBI handler and Robert Wisdom is also great as Edmund Beaumont - I knew I recognised him from somewhere but had to check Wikipedia to see he was Bunny Colvin in The Wire (which premiered over 20 years ago now!).  Ray Liotta is also good as Jimmy's Dad in his last television role - it took me way longer to realise it was him that it should have.

It's really well written - yes, it's based on a true story but I'm sure converting it for TV takes a lot of skill and Dennis Lehane has done a great job here weaving the various timelines together.  It's also well filmed - it looks very classy and some of the scenes take quite some set-up, particularly the prison riot and the subsequent clean-up,  One (all too common) complaint is that some of the scenes are too dark - you can barely see what's going on at times, but it doesn't happen too often so I'll let them off.

So yeah, this is well worth a watch - it's an interesting story which is well told (it's very suspenseful at times) and very well acted and the fact that it's based on a true story makes it all the more interesting.  It's also pleasingly different from everything else on the list so far so it's a strong recommendation from me - at time of writing it's available to watch on Apple TV+ and I think you should probably check it out.

#36 - Sorry - no time available
#38 - I just didn't care