Low Winter Sun was given the tough-task of having to follow the final season of Breaking Bad, which broke ratings records and captured a specific moment in the culture. Sure, just about anything coming on after Breaking Bad would have seemed like a letdown, but that doesn’t mean Low Winter Sun had to lean into every punch either.
Even though the show is set in Detroit and they tell us this 50 times an episode, it’s the first AMC series that doesn’t create a singular atmosphere. We can watch any given minute of Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Hell on Wheels, or even The Walking Dead, and know exactly what show we’re watching, but Low Winter Sun hides in cramped interrogation rooms and indistinguishably crappy back alleys that could belong to any gritty cop show on TV or The-Wire-as-scripted-by-David-Mamet.
I also don’t feel like the protagonist was very well thought out. This is a guy that (in the course of tonight’s episode) had a meltdown at a bank, gave his money away, violated a restraining order at his ex-wife’s house and nearly killed himself there, had a heart attack while trying to flee the country, carjacked someone at said airport, got in a fistfight with a construction crew, beat the shit out of a wall, tried multiple times to bring the whole department down (albeit in indirect and halfhearted ways), etc. and is never very clear on whether he wants to get caught or not. One minute he does, the next he doesn’t, one minute he’s suicidal, the next he’s ready to lie again, and the worst part is that it feels as arbitrary as the way I’ve described it. It’s like the constructs of the plot are driving him more than organic character action.
As a general rule, characters who are not very invested in their own survival aren’t all that compelling to me, which is probably why I find Lennie James’ corrupt detective Gettis and James Ransone’s scheming hoodlum to be infinitely more compelling. The problem? [major spoilers] Ransone’s small-time-on-the-verge-of-big-time hood was gunned down with only minutes to spare in the episode (by the henchmen of a character called Reverend Lowdown, who has perhaps the ugliest face on television) and after he’d finally overthrown the man he’d waited all season to take the place of. It’s the rare show that can make you feel sad to see a murderer go, and a hero survive, but this depressing (yet strangely compelling) show just can’t seem to let viewers have too much fun. Grade for season: C (I like parts of it it a lot, but it dragged in the middle) Grade for finale: C+ And I have to say that eliminating one of the more exciting characters doesn’t make me excited to see a season two.