Aquarius: Season 1
Created by John McNamara, US 2015
ITV Studios Home Entertainment, £19.99 DVD, £29.99 (Blu-ray)
There’s a definite appeal to this piece of self-described TV ‘historical fiction’: take a typical police procedural, lavish on it a Mad Men- esque fetish for 1960s period detail, and set it in 1967’s so-called ‘Summer of Love’, when San Francisco’s HaightAshbury was awash with flower children, LA was still twitchy from the Watts race riots and a young Charlie Manson, fresh out of prison and gatecrashing the hippy party, was collecting naïve young girls for his budding ‘Family’ in Topanga Canyon. Into this volatile social milieu Aquarius introduces its fictional characters: old school Hollywood homicide detective Samson Hodiak (an amiable David Duchovny) and his young partner, undercover narcotics officer Brian Shafe (Grey Damon), searching for a missing teenage girl who, they discover, has joined Manson’s ragtag commune. The runaway is the daughter of Hodiak’s old flame Grace (Michaela McManus), over whose lawyer husband Manson (Gethin Anthony, who gets away from the usual swivel-eyed lunacy but is maybe a bit too nice) seems to have some mysterious hold.
The continuing arc concerning the formation of the Family and Manson’s role as narcissistic hippy Messiah runs in tandem with more typical cop show storylines, some more effective than others, tackling the Black Panthers, drugs, institutional sexism (shades of Agent Carter) and anti-Vietnam protestors. Much of this is quite compelling and entertaining, and the series’s unstated but omnipresent theme of generational conflict – the breakdown of the old family and the emergence of a new one – gives it a weightier underpinning than most cop shows. Whenever it does veer into genre cliché, the multiple plotlines and large cast usually get it back on track. It will take at least another couple of seasons to move things along to the inevitable, bloody end of the hippy dream with the Tate-La Bianca slayings; seeing how the show decides to get there should be interesting.