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.