I can’t believe it’s taken this long, but Alabama Liberal has to give out its first (that I can remember) mea culpa. I told everyone who would listen about what a great show “Tyrant” is and how everyone and their brother should watch it or else wish they had when it gets big in a couple years. I said that people shouldn’t wait to get on the bandwagon when it’s on netflix a couple years down the road and really popular, and might have even called it the next Breaking Bad.
Boy, what a difference a couple months (and 9 increasingly shitty episodes) makes. In short: I was wrong. If you aren’t watching Tyrant or never watched it, well…I can’t say you really missed much. This is one of those shows that really did peak in the pilot episode, and it was an unfortunate decline from there. [Remember how the son was gay and it looked like that was going somewhere, but they abandoned it halfway through? Remember how the rebel leader was stirring up an uprising and looking like a formidable foe, but the main characters fought each other more than outside threats? Remember how annoying the blonde wife character was?]
I thought the series was going to be like a Middle Eastern “The Godfather” with the son who’s been living in America for years coming back to “the family business” and discovering he’s just as ruthless and pragmatic as an Arabic Michael Corleone, forced to step up to “save the family.” Well…”Tyrant” turned out to be the exact opposite of that as we mostly saw a ridiculously naive, unrealistically sanitized “hero” (Barry isn’t an anti-hero…or very interesting…or even right most of the time) undermine his family and work to unravel them from within.
He goes against his family, what’s right for the country (when his plans have consequences that could sink his barely-remembered birth country into a civil war or collapse their economy, he seems surprised that what he learned in a hypothetical Democracy 101 political science textbook doesn’t go exactly right), and even what’s right for himself. By the end of the series, he’s so foolishly “moral” that we no longer fully identify with him, and it’s his brother—the very “bad guy” he’s working to bring down—who is actually much more sympathetic.
When Jamal tearfully confronts his brother about his plans for a coup, you can feel his heart breaking, and yours breaks a little bit too…and that’s mostly because “Tyrant” still thinks its audience would rather watch a phony pseudo-Saint like Barry (who’s really an oblivious neocolonialist, using American government schemers to seize power in a country he’s not qualified to run) than a surprisingly multi-dimensional conniver like Jamal. If “Tyrant” had ended with Jamal killing Barry, it actually would have been more satisfying, and if there is a second season, I would hope it starts off that way.
Grade for Pilot: It’s still an A. Grade for Series: C…Grade for Series Finale: C-