HBO’s brilliant miniseries achieves new resonance in the days of fear.
Plotportrays how jeering authoritarians enable violent prejudice, and vice versa.
Its also about how a social disaster gradually amputates all possibility from daily life.
Michele K. Short/HBO
He means to say that theyre living in a bubble.
The 2004 novel has obvious 2016 parallels.
They all react differently to their historical crisis.
Morgan rages with paternal pride, jutting his chin into danger to prove hes not afraid.
Teenaged son Sandy (Caleb Malis) loves Lindbergh.
Terror: Thats the most palpable sensation thatPlotevokes.
And thats why the series has achieved even more resonance than its creators could have possibly intended.
The finale is currently slated to air in mid-April.
Mid-April is very far away.
Hell,tomorrowis far away.
The coronavirus stalks the land.
Governments are reacting too slow, too slow.
Now fear dominates the headlines.
COVID-19 makes its way into every conversation.
It is simplytheconversation, defining all responsibilities, pushing normal concerns aside.
We’re certainly a captive audience.
Actually, the possibility that the quarantine willonlylast until April 20 seems optimistic.
In five weeks you’ve got the option to tell me I was overreacting, Mom.
SoPlotwill work as a cathartic ritualandas an entertainingly weekly hour of television.
And it is very entertaining, not the take-your-medicine slog I’ve seen some other reviews describe.
Herman has ambitions, checking out real estate listings in fancy suburbs.
Bess is going back to work.
Young Philip is off snooping with a weirdo-cool schoolmate.
The nerdlinger kid next door bothers everyone.
Lindbergh is a distant figure.
You get to know the neighbors.
Then comes the fear.
Typical situations edge into fatal terror.
Supporting characters fade from view.
Everyone retreats (too late) into the comforts (not anymore) of their own home.
But the series mostly adheres to the Levins perspective.
You feel their steady slip from regularity into what Roth termed “perpetual fear.”
Safety turns to danger.
There are no more children playing in the street.
Average citizens view each other with suspicion.
Maybe this sounds familiar to you.
Maybe youre still wondering what the fuss is about.
Herman is proud, righteously assured that It Could Never Happen Here.
Bess is the paranoiac, her accurately dark premonitions dismissed.
(You imagine her three weeks ago, the nag demanding constant handwashing.)
You could say the Levins are lucky.
Weve got nothing but time, if were lucky.
