Critically lauded series ‘Manhattan’ offered glimpse at birth of atomic bomb
before “Oppenheimer” was a brilliant, IMAX-sharp gleam in director Christopher Nolan’s eye, there was “Manhattan,” a TV series whose fictionalized take on the birth of the atomic bomb ranks as perhaps the best show of the 2010’s that few have heard of.
Smart, tense, thought-provoking and blessed with an incisive sense of the cultural tenor of 1940s America, “Manhattan” failed to find a large audience over the course of its two seasons starting in 2014.
But maybe, just maybe, now that “Oppenheimer,” opening July 21, is one of the year’s most talked-about films, curious viewers belatedly will give “Manhattan,” available on Prime, AMC+ and other platforms, the attention it should have received nearly a decade ago.
After all, now that at least two of its performers, Rachel Brosnahan (“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”) and David Harbour (“Stranger Things”), are stars, perhaps “Manhattan” can be rescued from obscurity on the strength of their coattails alone.
Surprisingly, while the ideas of physicist Robert J. Oppenheimer, the man dubbed the father of the atomic bomb, hover at the center of “Manhattan,” he’s actually a somewhat peripheral character, played with a chilly, cigarette-smoking reserve by
Daniel London. Instead, creator/showrunner Sam Shaw (“Castle Rock,” “Masters of Sex”) and producer/writer/ director Thomas Schlamme (“The West Wing,” “Snowfall,” “Sports Night”) focus on all those working under and around him in the emotional hothouse that was the isolated, secret Los Alamos, N.M., laboratory, known as the Manhattan Project, where the bomb was born.
They are the driven, ruthless Ivy League-educated physicists as well as the immigrants chased out of Europe attracted to this scientific Shangri-La by, as one character puts it, the opportunity to “watch the apple fall with Newton.” They are the bored, lonely wives, kept ignorant of why they’ve been dragged to a wind-blown wasteland at the end of the Earth. They are the military grunts doing what they are told. And they are the Native American and Latino locals, reduced to silent, watchful day laborers on their own land.
One of those physicists is newcomer Charlie Isaacs (Australian actor Ashley Zukerman), a young, ambitious, Jewish scientist who is dubbed one of the great minds of his generation by his boss, Reed Akley (Harbour), who heads up one of two teams competing to make the weapon nicknamed “the gadget.” Isaacs, who rose from middle-class roots and wants desperately to stop the horrors being inflicted on Jews and others in Europe, knows he’s talented and has little time for social niceties. He even dismisses some of his more laissezfaire, moneyed teammates with a curt, “I’ve known fellas like you. Vacuous, the space between stars.”
The war at home
Still, Akley’s team is favored by Oppenheimer and the government, while the scrappier group — a motley crew of “misfits” that includes the lone female and Asian American scientists — is headed by brilliant but erratic Frank Winter (an intense John Benjamin Hickey, “The Good Wife”) and treated with barely disguised contempt.
Meanwhile, Charlie’s wife, Abby (Brosnahan), finds herself stranded, enduring endless rounds of small talk and casual racism of the other women. But she finds common cause with Winter’s wife, Liza (an extraordinary Olivia Williams, “The Ghost Writer,” “An Education,” “Rushmore”), a lauded botanist who, by the government’s orders, is not allowed to do any work in her field while at Los Alamos. Liza dreams of making the desert bloom even as her marriage withers underneath the harsh glare of her husLong band’s scientific obsessions.
Rippling underneath all of this like a seismic wave is preCold War paranoia. There are suspected spies in the house that Oppenheimer built, and a single interrogator (Richard Schiff, “The West Wing”), a one-man black-site operation, is going to root them out.
Schiff ’s perfectly tuned performance is exquisitely disturbing, a constant, thorny reminder that a facility like Los Alamos could operate outside the boundaries of law. “Technically you are nowhere, talking to no one,” he says coolly when one of his tortured suspects begins demanding his rights.
And then there’s the mushroom cloud in the room no one wants to talk about. What happens when these scientists are successful? “What about the next war?,” one asks. “What happens when Stalin’s got one? China? The Shah of Iran?”
It’s a question that still lingers.
While “Manhattan” may be faulty history (most of the characters and situations are fictional) that could have been played for soap opera, it never slips into melodrama. Instead, the taut direction with hints of an espionage thriller, the acting, the score from Sigur Ros’ Jónsi and Alex Somers, and rich cinematography from Richard Rutkowski (“The Americans,” “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan”) offer the feeling of authenticity.
Ratings bomb
But none of this was enough to save “Manhattan” from the chopping block. The series hit the air in 2014 as a prestige calling card from WGN America, a new network that was trying to emulate the success of AMC, the home of such watercooler-TV hits as “Mad Men,” “The Walking Dead” and “Breaking Bad.”
Critics and the relatively few viewers who tuned in to “Manhattan” raved — to this day, it retains a 91 percent among critics and 93 percent among viewers on Rotten Tomatoes — and it even won an Emmy for its clever opening credits and deserved many more. Vox would go on to headline a story about the show with the enthusiastic “Manhattan could do for the ’40s what Mad Men did for the ’60s. This isn’t a show about the Manhattan Project. It’s a show about America.”
Yet critics don’t pay the bills and period pieces are expensive. WGN America, which in 2016 produced another acclaimed period show, “Underground,” set during slavery, cut its losses and got out of the series business entirely. Most recently, the network was reborn as NewsNation, an upstart competitor to CNN,
Fox and MSNBC.
But WGN’s loss can still be the viewers’ gain. The longburied “Manhattan,” ahead of its time and yet timeless, remains waiting to be unearthed.