Prodigal Son (Mondays at 9:00 on Fox)
If you've ever watched Silence of the Lambs and wished it were rated PG and told in multiple hour-long bits, then Prodigal Son is the show for you!
Right off the bat, Prodigal Son is kind of nuts. A dark, creepy opening in which Dr. Whitly (the always wonderful Michael Sheen, Masters of Sex) is arrested for multiple murders while telling his son that they are "the same" gives way to that boy, Malcolm Bright (Tom Payne, The Walking Dead), as an adult being held hostage by a serial killer in a room surrounded by heads in jars. He's soon fired from his job at the FBI for punching a cop (just go with it, I know it doesn't make sense) and goes back to New York and the comfort of home to lick his wounds. But it isn't long before an NYPD officer (Lou Diamond Phillips) with a connection to Malcolm's past ropes him into working to find a killer who's copying Whitly.
It's almost an interesting premise. Creators Chris Fedak (Chuck) and Sam Sklaver (Bored to Death) address some heavy, very human themes in trying to trace the legacy of evil and the inheritance of mental illness. That part of the show, when Malcolm's relationship with his father is at the forefront, is intriguing. Their scenes in the present, because of course Malcolm has to visit his father for information about how to catch his copycat, are fraught and dramatic. They're a blatant knock-off of Silence of the Lambs and also feel very similar to the best moments in Netflix's Mindhunter, but they're successful because there's tension. The rest of the scenes oscillate between humdrum (anything at the police station or a crime scene) and bonkers (a BDSM dom strapped to a bomb getting his hand chopped off).
Tom Payne has an unappealing, manic energy in his performance that's hard to focus on. His eyes are wild, his body wound and ready to spring. There's a lot going on, and most of it is over the top. He's like a caged animal, even when the scene doesn't call for it. When he's having nightmares about his father and ending up imprisoned like him, that's fine. But when he's carrying a severed limb out of a bombed building muttering, "I need to give them a hand" (the cringe, you guys), it gets to be too much. He's better when he's with Sheen, who is magnetic and eerie in just a handful of short scenes. He's gleefully menacing while oozing charm, and his chemistry with Payne is languid. That sense of danger and animalism is missing from the procedural moments and from the moments Malcolm is interacting with his sister (The Orville's Halston Sage) and slightly off-kilter mother (Scandal's Bellamy Young, who looks far too young to be Malcolm's mother despite actually being an appropriate age). The case of the week in this pilot is interesting only insofar as it leads to the reunion of Malcolm and Whitly; otherwise, it's unexciting, because you're left waiting for Sheen to reappear or for a flashback to reveal some new information about the protagonists. Being two kinds of shows at once isn't quite successful; Prodigal Son needs to be more of a family drama and less of a cop show. And I'd love it left the batshit crazy stuff at the door too.
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