ALL OVER EMAP
‘Here and Now’: new HBO series doesn’t resonate
AUDREY Bayer (Holly Hunter) and Greg Boatwright (Tim Robbins) are two old Portland hippies approaching their golden years on Alan Ball’s new series “Here and Now,” premiering Sunday night.
After living by the liberal politics playbook, they’re asking themselves, as the famous Peggy Lee song goes, “Is That All There Is?” As an apology for being white, they adopted children from Liberia (Jerrika Hinton), Vietnam (Raymond Lee) and Colombia (Daniel Zovatto), but when the kids grow up they resent their parents’ motives — recognizing they’re little more than “advertisements” for their parents’ “progressive” good intentions.
In “Here and Now,” Ball strips away everything the Bayer-Boatwright’s hold dear. At his 60th birthday, Greg makes his guests uncomfortable with a monologue that expresses his disillusionment with life. Audrey, the manager of a non-profit called The Empathy Project, discovers that her mediating skills are no longer needed after she attempts to unite minority high-school students clashing with their white counterparts.
Into this backdrop of disappointment, a real crisis snaps the family out of its doldrums. Ramon, the clan’s Colombian-born son, begins having frightening, paranormal-tinged visions that make Audrey, a former therapist, thinks he’s having a psychotic break. He begins seeing a therapist (Peter Macdissi), a disaffected Muslim. With his mom freaking out that he might be like her schizophrenic brother (a biological impossibility), Ramon finds refuge with Henry (Andy Bean), a handsome barista, and the series finally finds a central character we can care about.
In contrast to the “poor-me” dialogue most of the cast is saddled with, Ramon is laconic and soft-spoken, drawing you to his predicament as the young man tries to figure out what’s wrong with his brain. This trajectory alone would be enough to launch a new family drama, but Ball juggles so many ideas and themes that he doesn’t give any of them sufficient room to breathe in the first four episodes provided for review.
“Here and Now” mostly plays as if HBO held a focus group, asked a roomful of strangers what kinds of issues they would like to see on TV in 2018 and gave the answers to Ball. The list of concerns addressed — race, politics, gender, sexuality — may check all the right diversity boxes, but there is very little in this series that arises from a passionate, personal place. Instead, we’re trapped with a bunch of malcontents we would never hang out with if given the choice.
As the parents, Hunter and Robbins have genuine moments of subtlety, grace and humor, but Hinton and Lee are one-dimensional, and Sosie Bacon has a thankless role as the perky Caucasian misfit child in this all-too-trendy, multi-cultural dysfunctional family.
If HBO was looking for a “This Is Us” with nudity, “Here and Now” is the aimless, unsatisfying result.