Manhattan Season 2

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This is a rarity, a review of content, not of a Blu-ray set. As this is a lengthy, editorial review, I advise against reading it if you are a fan who is just trying to decide on a purchase of an already enjoyed program. If you loved it, that is fine with me, but if you are unsure about this program, I have written this review for you. With respect to the Blu-rays, they offer the standard presentation, a high definition picture with excellent sound, essentially as the show appeared on television, and with that, I move to the issues that lead to the writing of this review.

If you enjoyed the first season of Manhattan, as I did, I simply wanted to offer you a warning, as to the content of the second season, which moved completely off course from the first season. For those who don’t know, the first season of Manhattan centered on the high-security, highly scrutinized efforts of mathematicians and physicists, including an assortment of PhD holders and even candidates and the like, to solve the problems inherent in creating a nuclear bomb, during World War II, in the hopes of winning the war and stopping the carnage.

Where the first season focused on the process, the toll on the workers, the desperate attempts by foreign governments to infiltrate the base, the desperation of those involved to achieve, as horrible as it sounds, the building of a weapon that could kill 100,000 people in one go, in order to stop a war and save millions of lives, the second season shifted and became a soap opera.

The story of the quest for the bomb, regardless of how you feel about the history of our use of that bomb or about the story itself, had been central. It was a fictionalized historical drama. In season two, that story all but disappears and is rendered a mere excuse for the assembly of the characters, in that place at that time. WWII is simply the reason they are there, together, so that the soap opera can unfold.

The subject of the soap opera was the reason the actress playing the daughter of the lead couple no longer wanted to participate in the show. That subject? Instead of fighting to save lives, trying to end a horrific war, the characters are engaged in an ever-worsening marital-discord drama. The two lead couples are cheating, fighting, behaving inappropriately and acting with little to no regard for their children.

Additionally, political obsession, on the part of the production team, demanded that a heterosexual character suddenly change heart, concurrent to the loss of her faith. That was done on Buffy, many years ago, and left a dear friend of mine extremely offended, on behalf of herself and her minority group, lesbians, because the idea that you can become an atheist or a pagan and be turned gay is the direct extension of the idea that you can cure being gay with becoming a person of faith. Not to get into any political discussion and regardless of how you feel about this idea, the simple fact is that it was a hurtful statement for the show to make and was found to be offensive by several of my friends, gay and straight alike, Christian, Jew and Atheist.

Beyond that, they felt the need to introduce, to attempt to repair the broken faith of that young woman and convert her to his particular version of faith, a psychopathic villain, a military commanding officer who is defined by his extreme cruelty, manipulation, lack of care for others, and, of all things, being a devoutly Christian man. Notice the mutually exclusive characteristics. Again, this was a bizarre and incongruous story. I have yet to meet a Christian who lives for the goal of hurting other people and goes out of his way to torture and harm.

I previously have tried to avoid the politics of sexuality and of the use of nuclear weapons and hope, very much, that I have succeeded, as I genuinely believe that we should all be free to think and feel whatever seems right to us, so long as we don’t harm each other. But, here, I must strive to avoid the politics of militia while discussing an issue that just stood out, to me, in the most painful and offensive way, as a member of a military family. This issue, screaming out of the show, rested on this Christian man, who is in no way a Christian, being, also, a career military officer.

This idea, that a man such as this could be a military commander, put in charge of the most important lives, in the most important part of the war effort, tasked with halting the, seemingly impossible to stop, daily slaughter, is just ridiculous. This character was as statistically unlikely to exist in the US military during WWII as an NBA player who routinely dunks the ball into the wrong basket, into the wrong goal, scoring for the other team. It simply makes no sense.

Being offensive to your Christian and Jewish viewers is one thing, and I do wonder why they wanted to be so offensive, but, with the addition of this storyline, it seemed they also wanted to label the military as ill-run and consisting, at the top levels, of crazy people and monsters, who somehow, as if by magic, achieved the impossible and won WWII. This storyline, more than any other, ruined the show for me and left me wishing I hadn’t seen the second season at all.

And, when you think it can’t get worse, with everything I’ve said, it does, and the lead characters all jump in the boat with the impossibly cruel commander and begin mistreating each other in increasingly unlikely ways. The behavior of multiple main characters and secondary characters begins to take on a farcical tone, seeming so impossible that, in order for that behavior to be believable, every character would have to be a drug addict or suffering a severe and sudden-onset of exceptional mental illness.

In short, this season bore little resemblance to the first. The actors are the same. The character names have not changed. The title was the same. Even the basic storyline remained the same. Still, somehow, this show became completely different. The characters morphed into strangely cartoonish and out-of-control villains while the storyline refocused, shifting to an endless soap-opera style abuse-fest.

I don’t recommend this second season to anyone, unless the melodramatic soap-style cruelty I have just described appeals to you. I do know people who liked it. They are anti-military and atheists, primarily, and enjoyed what they called an accurate depiction of a Christian military officer and a woman shedding her faith to embrace her true nature. However you see the political issues, of which there were many, I hope that, if you watch this, you will keep in mind that our military is almost entirely made up of excellent examples of human decency and kindness. It is and has been structured in such a way as to prevent a man like the new character from this season from ever rising in the ranks. Christians do not, for the vast majority of them, seek to harm others, nor do Jews, as was portrayed in this season. People don’t typically don’t behave this way, even now, and they certainly didn’t behave that way during the war that united our entire continent against the evil of genocide.

I hope this helps you to make up your mind and that my moderate stance didn’t offend you. I simply don’t see the point in fighting with people over who they are and in being cruel to those you don’t agree with. This show was very cruel and very specific in making statements about who the writers and producers don’t like. That left me with the proverbial bad taste in my mouth and I hope to help others to avoid that and hope you can forgive me for writing the kind of review I try never to write.

– Rae

OMG. What an amazing production for TV. Simply excellent. This season is taking the story to a new level of complexity. Acting, directing, staging, everything, just the best thing on TV right now.

I can really related to the Los Alamos setting and milieu, having lived directly across the valley in the Sangre de Cristos. Every day at precisely 4:00pm, my TV would suddenly turn on at full volume, and there was nothing I could do about it but unplug it. Or let it happen. Went on for about 10-20 minutes. This was in 1984. So weird. HAD to be from Los Alamos.

Also, one night I got lost coming back from a wilderness excursion across the Jemez Valley. I had stayed out too late, so I was driving the winding mountain road at night. Got lost, made a wrong turn, and found myself in this eerily creepy place, with lots of fences and gov’ment-issue buildings. Warning and hazard signs everywhere. And arrows pointing to fallout shelters emergency routes. Really? The houses all looked so out of place there in the NM Southwest, like they were a simulation of a town. (When I saw “Wayward Pines”, I felt like I had been to a place like that!)

Maybe Los Alamos is re-designed now into some slick, high-tech place. But even in the ’80’s., it looked like the ’50’s. This is what I’m talking about with “Manhattan”. They have really captured the whole mind-set and milieu of the time. It’s so fascinating, sometimes I forget while watching it, that this is not a documentary.

Watch it from the beginning (first season). The story builds with each episode. Excellent TV. Wow.

– Bevi Dobb

Definitely worth seeing. A largely unfamiliar (to me) cast brings great verisimilitude to this period drama and how could they not?… the attention to detail in costuming and sets is extraordinary. This is not your typical Hollywood version of the 1940’s where every car is a classic in waiting, every woman is quaffed and clothed perfectly, and every gent has an Errol Flynn hairpiece or a Clark Gable mustache. This is the 40’s the way I remember it looking in East LA. Even the food being consumed on screen has that overcooked monotone look to it. With such attention to detail, the actors get to concentrate on getting their words out and not bumping into furniture. They do that with alacrity and Producer Sam Shaw has a succes d’estime for his resume. Sometimes that is even better than just a plain old success… depends how old you are and your level of patience, I guess. I know I will look forward to the next thing Mr. Shaw brings to television while being sorry there is no season three to watch.

-Cagney & Lacey’s WebSquad

DVD Wholesale Main Features :  

Actors: Rachel Brosnahan, Neve Campbell, Michael Chernus, Christoper Denham, Griffin Dunne
Directors: Thomas Schlamme
Format: Box set, Color, NTSC, Widescreen
Language: English
Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only.)
Number of discs: 3
Studio: LIONSGATE
DVD Release Date: March 8, 2016
Run Time: 622 minutes

 

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