Something to watch tonight: Monday 1 December

I wasn’t expect­ing the last two TV series we watched to fea­ture white suprem­acists as the vil­lains (three if we count Tangata Pai which I will cov­er sep­ar­ately at a later date) but these are the times we live in and we should be grate­ful that the cre­at­ors of shows could not only see what was com­ing but had the mor­tal forti­tude to keep going.

Zeitgeist is one of those crit­ic words that I try and avoid using but it’s hard not to feel that James Gunn (now respons­ible for the entire DC Comics cine­mat­ic uni­verse) and Sterlin Harjo (whose empire is much more mod­est … so far) have their fin­gers on the pulse of something.

Peacemaker is the finest vehicle yet for the sin­gu­lar tal­ents of pro-wrestler John Cena. The char­ac­ter was a bit of a joke in the com­ic books of the 60s but Cena and Gunn have fleshed him out and giv­en him some heart. Christopher Smith has come to real­ise that a) viol­ence isn’t a path to peace and b) viol­ence was mainly a way for him to deal with his child­hood trauma and that per­haps there’s a bet­ter way.

At the begin­ning of sea­son two, Cena’s Smith is still numbed by the dis­cov­er­ies he made about his fam­ily in sea­son one and emo­tion­ally ill-equipped to join the Justice Gang, the Superman-adjacent super­hero group led by Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion).

Yes, this sea­son of Peacemaker ties in to the recent Superman reboot but — and if I have one job here it’s this one — respons­ible par­ents with chil­dren who were cap­tiv­ated by the David Corenswet’s Superman and who are keen to see anoth­er whole­some story like that, you must do everything in your power to keep tham away from this one.

Unlike the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where every ele­ment was pitched at roughly the same age group and watch­ing all of them was a require­ment for under­stand­ing what the heck was going on, Gunn’s DC uni­verse con­tains mul­ti­tudes and Peacemaker is very much of the R18 variety.

One thing that this com­ic book uni­verse shares with Marvel is the concept of the “mul­ti­verse”, an all-purpose story com­plic­at­or in which altern­ate ver­sions of char­ac­ters exist on dif­fer­ent tem­por­al planes and may even at times meet each other.

This is the incit­ing incid­ent of sea­son two, as a very depressed and hun­gov­er Chris Smith goes through the portal that his dad (Robert Patrick) cre­ated, stumbles across anoth­er ver­sion of him­self and acci­dent­ally kills him. Going into his dead self’s world, he real­ises that ver­sion of Smith/Peacemaker wasn’t such a fuck-up and that life could actu­ally be pretty good for him. Except that in that altern­ate uni­verse, the Nazis won World War II and the hard-won val­ues he had come to believe in weren’t worth a hill of beans there.

Gunn’s eclect­ic com­bin­a­tion of rank sen­ti­ment­al­ity, weird nos­tal­gia and ter­rible dirty jokes is give free rein in Peacemaker but it is Cena’s fun­da­ment­al decency that made me come back for more.

Another unlikely hero can be found in the Tulsa-set neo-noir, The Lowdown, star­ring Ethan Hawke. He plays a book­seller, his­tor­i­an and cit­izen journ­al­ist with a determ­in­a­tion for uncov­er­ing the less savoury aspects of the people who think they should rule. Hawke’s Lee Raybon is loosely based on the real Lee Roy Chapman who, among oth­er things, helped reveal many of the dast­ardly con­nec­tions between Tulsa’s founders and the Ku Klux Klan and involve­ment in the Tulsa Massacre of 1921.

Tulsa’s his­tory of white suprem­acy and cor­rup­tion was a theme of the Watchmen series and it comes into play again here.

But at first, Raybon is only inter­ested in invest­ig­at­ing the sup­posed sui­cide of a loc­al author (Tim Blake Nelson), broth­er of gubernat­ori­al can­did­ate Kyle MacLachlan. He has left clues to a con­spir­acy hid­den in the pages of books by the great Jim Thompson, help­ing some of us get a handle on the kind of mys­tery we are going to be experiencing.

Like Philip Marlowe, Raybon is motiv­ated by a need to get at the truth, usu­ally at the expense of his own phys­ic­al safety. Like Philip Marlowe, he finds a trail that leads in some strange dir­ec­tions but usu­ally to the top.

The Lowdown is a great show, a great vehicle for Ethan Hawke (who is on quite a roll at the moment) and a mag­net for superb char­ac­ter act­ors who can really get their teeth into things. Peter Dinklage arrives in epis­ode five and then steals it right out from under everyone’s noses and then dis­ap­pears again — per­fect guest star behaviour.

Further listening

You can listen to my radio review of Peacemaker on RNZ Nights with Emile Donovan or you could check out me talk­ing about The Lowdown on the same pro­gramme (slightly under the influ­ence of paink­illers) here.

Where to watch Peacemaker

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Aotearoa: Streaming on Neon

Australia: Streaming on HBO Max or FoxtelNow

Canada: Streaming on Crave

Ireland & UK: Streaming on NowTV

India: Not cur­rently avail­able online

USA: Streaming on HBO Max

Where to watch The Lowdown

Aotearoa, Australia, Canada: Streaming on Disney+

Australia:

Canada:

India, UK & Ireland: Not cur­rently avail­able online

USA: Streaming on Hulu or FXNow