You never fully believe that anybody would let a clown like Fonzo be in charge, but that’s OK because Rossellini’s Rita offers inscrutable menace.
For now, it’s a good contrast to Sampson’s sloppy, Rabelaisian take on Fonzo, a man with little taste, little restraint and no boundaries. Later episodes will eventually let Charlie use his magic background and make him more aggressive, but then Donovan will just be playing his Burn Notice role again, though I’m sure audiences will be pleased to have Michael Westen back. The fourth episode, from Clark Johnson, is a tightly produced bottle episode that spins the story off in yet another new direction, but it abruptly raises the stakes around a character most people won’t care about.Īfter several TV roles as swaggering alphas, you can tell Donovan is enjoying laying back a little on Charlie, playing a guy with an agile mind who has been forced into a submissive position and doesn’t quite know what to do with himself. The second and third episodes, helmed by Weeds veterans Craig Zisk and Michael Trim, veer in the direction of less effective comedy, unsure if Charlie’s hallucinations are meant to be funny or disturbing or spiritual.
The pilot, well directed by Johan Renck ( Vikings), counters narrative darkness with SoCal sunniness and humor stemming from the tackiness of this scam trade.
Throwing in a subplot with a Romani cultural society bent on advancing images of their people beyond fraud and flimflam and I had a couple, “This is a good, different world for a TV show” moments, before Shut Eye too often left the unique behind for a more conventional con man story and stale cable boundary-pushing on sex and violence and exhausted-looking antiheroes.Įach episode has a different tone. The pity is that he’s landed on such a great backdrop! With their neon signage, most featuring a distinctive palm insignia, parlor-shop psychics, many in seemingly residential areas, are such a fascinating phenomenon, and when you throw in the influence of the Romani and start using jargon like “ bujo” and “the egg curse scam,” that really ought to have been enough for a series. Jeffrey Donovan Talks 'Shut Eye,' the Joys of Binge-Watching and the "Huge Toll" His 'Fargo' Role TookĬreator Les Bohem, whom I’ll always admire for his work on the terrific, less-celebrated-than-it-should-be, Spielberg-produced miniseries Taken, attacks Shut Eye with an attention deficit so acute it’s no wonder that recreational use of Adderall is both a plot point and a plot point that gets pushed aside when something differently shiny catches Bohem’s eye. After suffering some sort of skull injury, Charlie is maybe hearing voices or maybe having visions or something. There are lots of variably involving misadventures with a potentially lucrative whale (of the mark variety) played by Mel Harris, an amoral drug lord (David Zayas), the typical cable drama teenage bumbling from Charlie’s son (Dylan Schmid) and the arrival of an unpredictable hypnotist ( Emmanuelle Chriqui), but everything gets truly messed up when Charlie’s advice leads to a beating at the hands of a client’s ex. Charlie is “ gaje,” or a non-gypsy, and he’s essentially picking up scraps, which frustrates his former Vegas stripper wife Linda ( KaDee Strickland), who remember when her hubby used to be a real man. Charlie is working as a psychic, gently bilking clients and paying up to slovenly, malicious Romani gangster Fonzo (Angus Sampson, who played Donovan’s brother in the second season of Fargo), whose family (including Isabella Rossellini’s icy matriarch Rita) controls all of the psychic and fortunetelling businesses in L.A. Jeffrey Donovan, who played something of a con man in Burn Notice, stars as Charlie, whose backstory includes time spent as a designer of ambitious magic tricks in Las Vegas, one of many details that I assume will eventually pay off but have been, in the episodes I’ve seen, just a tease. Hulu Shifts to Binge Model for Psychic Drama 'Shut Eye'
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