The Old Man Review: Jeff Bridges Thriller Has No Trouble Keeping Up With Younger Dramas

There’s a moment roughly halfway through the series premiere of The old man where Harold Harper (John Lithgow) sits with his grandson, building a castle out of blocks. We don’t know anything about Harper yet, but he lives throughout the estate and comes across as thoughtful and articulate. “Space is the breath of art,” he says, quoting Frank Lloyd Wright in an attempt to impart a lesson to his grandson. Although the grandson may be too young to understand, The old man himself could be seen as embodying the philosophy of this quote. As the series unfolds, it leaves plenty of room for the characters, action, and hard-hitting moments to breathe, creating an often very effective slow burn.

The first episode, which aired June 16 on FX and premiered the following day on Hulu, is one of 2022’s most immediately compelling debuts. Jeff Bridges plays Dan Chase, a former CIA agent with a mysterious past who, after years from hiding, finds himself confronted with whatever mess he made in his previous life. The assassins start coming for him in the middle of the night. He finds trackers hidden under his car. He picks up and moves, again and again, only to find that his former enemies (perhaps once friends?) are good enough to hunt him down. The premiere is beautifully paced, only giving plot and character details in small doses, leaving the viewer to feel unsettled by what’s going on and unsure of which characters to trust.

The tense feeling that pervades the premiere is something the show largely manages to retain as the long episodes (three of the four episodes sent to reviewers are over an hour long) unfold. The old man does a good job of spreading out its various twists, building up the tension where needed. What really makes the show work, however, is how it executes its non-action scenes. Of course, the thriller is the best part of the show, as Bridges tries to escape her captors in violent sequences shot with a precision, clarity and style rare on TV these days. But the show is also incredibly poignant in its quieter moments, thinking about ideas of identity, morality and aging.

Specifically, The old man is compelling as a story about the stories we tell ourselves and how easily we see ourselves as the heroes when others might not share that view. There’s a sense of unease throughout the early episodes because the show never clarifies whether Dan or Harold or anyone else involved here is a “bad guy” or a “good guy.” Rather, everyone lives in that murky in-between, which creates compelling character drama. Dan is forced to face the consequences of his actions not only with the adult daughter he is trying to protect, but also with the people he meets during his escape, such as an Airbnb host named Zoe (Amy Brenneman) with whom he becomes intimate, taking her on a journey she never imagined for herself.

The show can’t fully maintain the momentum of the premiere. The flashbacks, which make up about a quarter of each episode, are perhaps necessary for our understanding of the characters, as they tell us about Dan’s mission in Afghanistan and what he did so that the CIA and an Afghan warlord named Faraz Hamzad are working to find him. . But they too often slow the action and feel much slower than the lived-in world of the current timeline, where Bridges, Brenneman, and Lithgow bring real gravity to the political drama. Still, The old man is thrilling more often than not, and it’s anchored by huge lead performances that make it a worthwhile watch for anyone who needs a real adult political thriller in their life.

Firsts: Thursday, June 16 at 10/9c on FX, airing the following day on Hulu
Who is in: Jeff Bridges, John Lithgow, Amy Brenneman, Alia Shawkat
Who is behind: Creators Jonathan E. Steinberg and Robert Levine (black sails)
For fans of: Americans, homeland, parallax view
How many episodes we watched: 4 out of 7

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