The series opens on a man crushing up a tablet and painstakingly measuring out a dosage, and it somehow only gets slower from there. The first episode of "American Rust" premieres on September 12.Cast: Jeff Daniels, Maura Tierney, Bill Camp, David Alvarez, Alex Neustaedter, Julia Mayorga, Mark Pellegrino, Rob Yangĭeveloped by: Dan Futterman, from the book by Philipp MeyerĮxecutive producers: Dan Futterman, Jeff Daniels, Michael De Luca, Adam Rapp, Paul Martino, Katie O'Connell Marsh, Elsa Ellisīut all these prestige trappings can’t save American Rust from its fundamental, fatal flaw: It’s hopelessly boring. About the nicest thing that can be said about "American Rust," is that it’s easy to watch. Daniels and Tierney can only do so much with these characters that are a product of the show’s incurious environment and deficient storytelling, playing into grit-less ideas of austere working-class lifestyles. But the episode's character-based moments, and the bursts of plot that move the mystery forward with a chase and suspect, are handled in such tedious fashion.Īll to say that the show adds up to little, even after three episodes that clock in about 55 minutes each. It’s the type of hang-out episode that most series would save for later in the season, and if “American Rust” were tighter and more rich, going so early would be significant.
It’s based around a shotgun wedding for the town, and it brings in different figures from the series in capacities, highlighting their relationships in who they spend time with at the party, what they talk about. The second episode of "American Rust" tries to show the strength of this series from creator Dan Futterman, but it instead becomes more revealing about its flaws and shortcomings. It's also a little maddening that while the show includes so many ideas-rampant, casual drug usage, the care-taking of a parent, strained romantic relationships later in life, unionizing, football, etc.-it's hardly about much of anything.
Bleakness becomes not just a cover but its own aesthetic, made all the more suffocating by the heavy handed dialogue that adds a graveness to the gradual, lackluster plotting that will do something like casually throw two characters into a frozen river, in need of some type of thrill. His sister Lee (Julia Mayorga) left Buell for the big city, and marriage to a rich guy, but she returns to the city when Isaac disappears toward the end of episode one.Īll to say that this series is rife with hollow but sorrowful characters, their creation little more than a smudgy panorama of American miserabilism. Isaac has his own vague history, and current angst with his father Henry English ( Bill Camp), and a mother who was found in the nearby lake with rocks in her pockets. Billy embodies a type of fleeting potential for the people of Buell, having lost his shot to possibly become a football star, and Neustaedter’s performance is one of many huffy, sour pieces to the production.īilly has a friendship, depicted as a thick fog, with a peer named Isaac (David Alvarez), who watched Billy got into what became the crime scene. Billy’s mother is Grace (Tierney, not given a great deal in the first three episodes provided to press), who is leading unionizing efforts in the town, and finds her emotional attention pulled between Del and her more openly shithead husband. Del uses his sway as a policeman, as a figure of the community who can sit across from the judge like an old pal, to get the aforementioned Billy a lighter sentence for a brutal assault that nonetheless looks to be in self-defense. The modern mystery of “American Rust” relates to events from six months ago, which are given extensive detail in the first episode. He can be fun to watch, if even for how his approach to calm authority (this side of "The Newsroom") remains unequaled. His tone is all Daniels, unbroken stares and sardonic line deliveries, as if the actor's final form is to going to pseudo-Westerns such as this. Del roams the town as a type of all-knowing father figure, with his own demons and isolation, and is able to handle the barkeeps as much as the gun-toting men who try to intimidate outsiders. He is one piece of the show’s initially interesting idea of drug users, shown crushing and then carefully weighing out his medication in the pilot's opening minutes, rhyming how others use pills and other intoxicants in this community that involves a lot of buildings under conviction. Daniels stars in the series as Del, a police chief in the quiet city of Buell that stands far away from the ritz of Pittsburgh, and whose bars function as the community center.
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