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Review: Is 'Manhattan' the best TV can do about the atomic bomb?

There is something deeply perverse about Manhattan, cable channel WGN's well-executed, edge-of-your-seat drama that returns for its second season at 9 p.m. Tuesday.

William Petersen as Colonel Darrow and Olivia Williams as Liza Winter in "Manhattan," season 2. (Photo: WGN America)
William Petersen as Colonel Darrow and Olivia Williams as Liza Winter in "Manhattan," season 2. (Photo: WGN America)Read more

There is something deeply perverse about Manhattan, cable channel WGN's well-executed, edge-of-your-seat drama that returns for its second season at 9 p.m. Tuesday.

Writer-producer Sam Shaw's series is an espionage thriller/domestic melodrama posing as historical epic. It's a fictionalized story of the scientists at Los Alamos, N.M., who developed the A-bomb during WWII. Manhattan is an overwrought, overripe piece of pulp fiction stuffed with overboiled intrigue.

Aside from Manhattan Project guru J. Robert Oppenheimer (Daniel London), who remains a peripheral figure, the characters are imagined and the science is watered down or ignored.

At the end of Season One, our heroes, Frank Winter (John Benjamin Hickey) and Charlie Isaacs (Ashley Zukerman) proved the bomb the Army wanted to build wouldn't work. Mocked as a madman throughout the season, Frank came out on top. But the shadowy, nameless counterespionage spook so chillingly portrayed by Richard Schiff is convinced Charlie is a Nazi spy. Frank saves Charlie by confessing he's the leak and is taken away in chains.

The new season picks up hours later: The identity of the real spy is revealed, Charlie is triumphant as the new team leader, and Frank is subjected to a terrifying ordeal at the hands of the Army.

Sounds just like an episode of 24 (or Homeland, Prison Break, Scandal, even CSI) doesn't it? That's what galls me about Manhattan: It reduces a unique story to a typical genre entry.

Shaw has said he is less concerned with doing historiography than with capturing the story's emotional truth. Like so many in Hollywood, he seems to think the two are mutually exclusive. There is an extraordinary, exciting, true story to be told here. Why not just tell it?

Let's leave that question aside and take Shaw at his word. What kind of emotional truth does Manhattan reveal?

There's the rub: Shaw's characters are ruinous, emotionally stunted creatures.

Frank is a delusional narcissist convinced that, out of thousands of experts, he's the one who can win the war. He sacrifices his friends' careers and lives to prove how important he is.

Charlie is a coward and a heartless social climber content to see people trampled if it helps his career. And Oppenheimer? He's a spineless, indecisive ninny so enraptured by his S&M-loving mistress he can't concentrate on work.

And these are the good guys!

The villains in Manhattan aren't the Axis troops but the U.S. military-bureaucratic machine. The base's new commander, Emmett Darrow (William Petersen) is a Bible-thumping weirdo who forces people to apologize to Jesus for their sins. Schiff and his colleagues in intelligence are sadistic idiots who accuse people of espionage without evidence.

Psychos, perverts, morons, and incompetents - and their empty-headed, neurotic, preening wives. Such is Manhattan's cast of characters.

I know this is the era of the antihero. An age when dramas aspire to take an unflinching, hard-hitting look at life. But even by those criteria, I have to ask: Is this the best TV can do with the Manhattan Project?

tirdad@phillynews.com

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