Two years ago, Oscar winner Jeff Bridges made a triumphant entry into the prestige TV arena with The Old Man, a thriller that showed that even old spies can hold onto their skills and pair them with the wisdom their advanced years give them. Now a second season finds Bridges’ character, Dan Chase, in Afghanistan with his old CIA frenemy Harold Harper, played by John Lithgow.
THE OLD MAN SEASON 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: Dan Chase (Jeff Bridges) and Harold Harper (John Lithgow) are in the back of a truck rumbling through Afghanistan. A sunbeam comes through and wakes Harper, who unknowingly fell asleep.
The Gist: The two retired spies are in the country to find and rescue Chase’s daughter Emily (Alia Shawkat), whom Harper always knew as his FBI mentee, Angela Adams. She’s been captured by associates of Faraz Hamzad (Navid Negahban), a former Afghan warlord that Chase and Harper dealt with during the Soviet occupation of the country in the ’80s. There’s a reason why Hamzad kidnapped Emily, however; she’s actually his daughter Parwana, whom his wife Belour (Hiam Abbass) smuggled out of the country. When she married Chase, he took care of both of them.
After their truck is ambushed and their driver/fixer is killed, the two of them are on their own to make their planned rendezvous. Somehow, despite not being in the country for over 30 years, Chase still knows the territory well enough that he’s able to find the spot, though they almost get killed before Omar (Artur Zai Barrera), representing their resistance contact, intercepts them.
They find out from Omar that Hamzad owns a massive lithium mine, and he is in bed with his former enemies in the Taliban, mainly because the US government hasn’t sanctioned him, for unknown reasons. Omar then asks Chase if he was the American that did Hamzad’s bidding back in the day, when both men had Russia as a common enemy. Chase calls it “a good story.” Chase’s trust of Omar starts to waver, however, when the three of them come across an encampment full of the contact’s dead “brothers.”
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? At this juncture of the series, The Old Man feels more like Homeland than 24, especially if both of the main characters were the same age as Saul Berenson.
Our Take: Season 2 of The Old Man, created by Jonathan E. Steinberg (who is also the showrunner) and Robert Levine based on Thomas Perry’s novel, definitely veers a bit from the first season’s conceit that Chase is flushed out of hiding and finds out that he and Harper need to work together to find Emily. Heck, all the pretense of the fact that Emily is also known as Angela and basically sees both men as father figures is old news. Now, it becomes two old men using all the skills they’ve learned over the decades to rescue her from their archenemy.
It’s actually a fairly simple mission in Season 2, but given the cast and the level of writing we saw in Season 1, we know that even plots that have fairly straightforward objectives can be explored in many directions. The second episode, for instance, goes away from Chase and Harper and concentrates more on Emily and exactly why Hamzad abducted her. That certainly shows that Steinberg and the writers have confidence in characters like Shawkat’s that they can go away from two dominant presences like Bridges and Lithgow and still make a compelling episode.
Of course, the dynamic of the show is a little different than it was in the first season, with Bridges and Lithgow now being bickering old men who just happen to be traversing the rough and rocky Afghan terrain. It’s almost like Grumpy Old Men Dodge The Taliban in this case, where super-serious discourse about Hamzad and the state of the country in 2024 is interrupted by Harper’s need to pee every couple of hours and Chase telling him that he thinks too much like a cop.
But the further we explore Chase’s complex life, whether it’s in the present or during the show’s myriad flashbacks (Bill Heck plays young Chase and Leem Lubany plays young Belour), the more layers we add to what at first seems like a straightforward mission.
Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.
Parting Shot: In the cave Chase and Harper escape to after battling Omar, Chase wakes up to see Hamzad holding a gun on him.
Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to Shawkat, even though we don’t see her until the second episode. We’re used to seeing her in comedies like Arrested Development and dramedies like Search Party, but she has a presence as the dead-serious Emily/Angela/Parwana, especially in a scene where she learns without a doubt that Hamzad is her birth father.
Most Pilot-y Line: Harper hears from his current wife that she’s upset that he was in touch with his ex-wife, whom they need to help get them past their predicament at the end of the first episode.
Our Call: STREAM IT. The strong performances of Jeff Bridges and John Lithgow continue to make The Old Man a must-watch, but it definitely has enough confidence in its ensemble to give us stories without either of them in front of the camera.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
The post Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Old Man’ Season 2 On FX, Where Jeff Bridges Is An Old Spy Going Deep Into Afghanistan To Rescue His Daughter appeared first on Decider.
