The sprawling, historical miniseries has all but disappeared from broadcast television, the days when something like Roots was a cultural event pretty much forgotten, but it’s enjoyed a slow renaissance of sorts on cable, with prestige projects like HBO’s Band of Brothers and AMC’s Broken Trail garnering heaps of critical praise and Emmy nominations. Now TNT’s epic slog The Company (August 5, 12 and 19, 8 p.m.) makes a bid for the same kind of success, roping in respectable film actors (Chris O’Donnell, Alfred Molina, Michael Keaton) and other solid, recognizable players for a fictionalized take on the history of the CIA, based on Robert Littell’s nearly 900-page novel.
As befits such a substantial book, the miniseries covers more than 40 years, beginning with a brief visit to 1950 and ending with the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union. O’Donnell anchors the show as Jack McAuliffe, who starts out as an ambitious Yale student recruited by his crew coach to join the then-fledgling agency. Jack is first assigned to postwar Berlin in 1954, under the watchful eye of veteran spy Harvey Torriti (Molina), and the first installment finds him falling in love with a Russian ballet dancer who’s also a valuable source of information.
The two subsequent episodes each strike a different tone, following the espionage-focused opener with an action-oriented second part covering the 1956 Hungarian uprising and the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba (both of which Jack happens to find himself in the middle of). The third episode is a slow, dry look at the search for a CIA mole, led by the fastidious and obsessive James Angleton (Keaton), one of the show’s few characters based directly on an actual historical figure.
Mining the same territory as the 2006 film The Good Shepherd for its first two-thirds, The Company manages to be more lively but less elegant, and the end result is just about the same: crushing boredom. O’Donnell is an affable but not especially commanding presence, and unconvincing as a passionate lover, an inspirational battlefield leader or a shrewd government agent. About the only thing he succeeds in imparting is being a dependable, stand-up guy.
With impressive production values for a basic-cable miniseries, the show effectively conveys the geographical and chronological scope of its tale, although the decision to saddle every major actor with old-age makeup in the third part is a terribly distracting mistake. Molina has fun with his salty old-school spy character, but Keaton gives an irritating, mannered performance as Angleton, whose single-mindedness was as off-putting to his colleagues as it becomes to the viewer. When his internal witch-hunt takes center stage in the final episode, any excitement that had previously been created disappears right away.
The Company wants to be a nuanced look at the notion of bad guys and good guys in the morally muddled Cold War (“Which ones were we?” asks Molina’s Torriti in the series’ final scene), but its efforts to create sympathetic Commies in a Russian-American schoolmate of Jack’s who becomes a KGB agent and a British defector who spends his later years rotting in the USSR are only blips in a relatively black-and-white ethical universe. The foursquare dialogue and plodding pace combine to make The Company as fussy and upstanding as the agents it depicts, and just about as much fun to spend time with.
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The Company
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