We’ll discuss AMC’s new limited series McMafia in a second, but first, a question: Did you watch The Night Manager? You remember The Night Manager, right? It was the AMC limited series — based on a John le Carré novel — that starred a mid-Hiddleswift Tom Hiddleston as a reluctant fighter of crime and Hugh Laurie as a pastel-clad arms dealer who spent most of his time in a secluded hilltop mansion in Mallorca. It was globetrotting and dense and very European, and it was all a great deal of duplicitous fun all the way up until its entirely too tidy and unsatisfying conclusion.
I bring this up because there’s a short version and a long version of this McMafia review, and if we can get you out of here in 200 words instead of 800-1000, I see no reason we shouldn’t do that. The short version goes something like this: If you liked The Night Manager, there’s a pretty solid chance you’ll like McMafia. A lot of the beats are the same. McMafia is also a globetrotting and dense AMC limited series that takes place in Europe. It has a reluctant protagonist, too, who is also drawn into the underworld by a combination of duty and revenge and is played by an actor who is in the running to be the next James Bond. It even has a mysterious international criminal figure played by a recognizable actor, although now instead of Hugh Laurie in pastels in a Mallorca compound we get David Strathairn in a very tiny European bathing suit in an Israeli compound. The Night Manager was not as dark as McMafia (in color scheme and subject matter) and its plot was a little less sprawling, but yeah. This is the short version. Feel free to skip out now if you’re satisfied, one way or the other.
The longer version, on the other hand, goes a little more like this: McMafia is a new AMC limited series created by Hossein Amini and James Watkins, based on a nonfiction book of the same name. It stars James Norton as a wealthy investment banker named Alex Godman who was born in Russia but raised in London after his mob boss father and uncle were chased out of their homeland by a rival. When we first meet Alex, he is squeaky clean and very respectable, with a wife who works for an organization that specializes in “ethical capitalism.” But as anyone who has seen The Godfather knows, squeaky clean children of mob bosses rarely stay that way very long, and before you can say “This one time I’ll let you ask me about my affairs,” bingo bango, Alex is neck deep in international crime.
And it’s all… fine. It’s fine. It’s probably better than fine. I’ll go as high as “pretty good.” I’m enjoying the show quite a bit through four episodes. The trick here is going to be your tolerance for two things that appear at odds: One, the show moves at its own pace, and that pace is not all that quick; and two, there is a lot going on here, possibly too much.
Let me explain. Compared to a lot of recent cable-type dramas, McMafia moves kind of slow. There’s action, sure. A Russian hitman gets kabonged on the head with a kettlebell at one point. But huge chunks of the show consist of two to five people sitting around and discussing crimes they want to do and/or have done, sometimes in a bleak Russian alley and sometimes in a Mumbai nightclub and sometimes on a yacht off the coast of France. It’s a lot of talking to follow and a fair amount of it is in Russian with subtitles. If those are non-starters for you, McMafia is not for you.
The other tricky thing is that the talking is done by a lot of people who are doing a lot of loosely connected things in a lot of different parts of the world, at least in the early going. There’s Alex and his wife and parents in London, David Strathairn in Israel, gangsters in Russian and Mumbai, corrupt businessmen and cops in Prague, and cocaine-smuggling Mexican cartel figures on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s a lot to keep track of and it’s another reason the show moves at the pace it does. Each of these characters and stories need chunks of time to develop their part of the plot and every time we switch to check in on one of them we have to briefly press pause the others.
Which, again, is fine. There’s nothing wrong with a complicated story that moves along deliberately. It hasn’t bothered me so far, but I should also point out that I’ve had the luxury of ripping through episodes one after the other on AMC’s screener site, whereas home viewers will have the story ladled out in weekly hour-long increments. I do wonder if that will make for a different experience and if it will make it harder to follow along with all the show’s various tentacles. It might just be better as a binge-watch, which is also fine. That’s what DVRs and streaming sites are for. I do think it’s worth checking out, though, especially if global underworld dramas are your thing, but also because the show gave me an excuse to post the “Hugh Laurie exiting his bright red helicopter in matching bright red pants” promotional picture from The Night Manager again.
Gotta count for something.
McMafia premieres Monday, February 26 on AMC
