The first 4 episodes of Government Cheese at the moment are streaming on Apple TV+. One new episode will debut each Wednesday via May 28.
It’s 1969, and God needs Hampton Chambers (David Oyelowo) to invent a self-sharpening drill. So sayeth the Lord that His loyal follower shall disrupt and innovate the sector of handheld equipment—or so Hampton believes, anyway, having discovered faith whereas in jail for verify fraud. With plot factors like this, you possibly can inform that Apple TV+’s new sequence Government Cheese needs so deeply to be bizarre. But the present by no means quantities to greater than a bundle of affectations, the equal of watching someone “lower free” by coming into the workplace with, like, a barely louder tie or one thing.
To get an thought of the tone right here, image a sport of phone that begins on the broader comedies of the Coen brothers – huge personalities towards a backdrop of screwy Americana, like Raising Arizona or O Brother, Where Art Thou? Somewhere within the center, already warped and diluted into semi-recognition, is the Coen karaoke of the Fargo TV sequence. Government Cheese exists on the finish of the road, visiting mildly wacky circumstances on a solid of quirky cardboard cutouts.
Hampton, in any case, doesn’t get out on parole with solely designs on a divine drill; he’s additionally in hefty debt to the Prevost brothers, a household of French-Canadian gangsters working out of an orange grove. There are seven of them. He doesn’t inform his spouse, Astoria (Simone Missick), who’s already – and fairly understandably – peeved at having to lift their teenage sons alone throughout Hampton’s three-year imprisonment whereas additionally pursuing a school diploma. Their youngest, Harrison (Jahi Di’Allo Winston), is overtly hostile to his father’s return, retreating into an odd fixation on indigenous Chumash tradition. The oldest, Einstein (Evan Alexander Ellison), is extra genial but additionally now actually into pole vaulting.
To various levels, these particulars are no less than just a little bit humorous, and so they play out towards a good-looking backdrop of pastel colours and manicured suburban lawns (manufacturing designer Warren Alan Young has credit on a number of seasons of Fargo). Every so typically, you possibly can even glimpse what the present goes for – every Chambers is striving for success, whether or not non secular or skilled (or, in Hampton’s case, each), from the meager hand they’ve been dealt. Hence the title: “authorities cheese,” in reference to the processed meals given to impoverished folks to allow them to make one thing from what’s functionally nothing.
But these glimpses are nearly as good because it will get with this sequence, which has solely a tenuous grasp of the characters past their surface-level quirks. For a narrative constructed on Hampton’s homecoming and his dedication to stroll the righteous path, there’s treasured little perception into what the Chambers family was like earlier than or throughout his incarceration. We don’t get a way of shared historical past between the household, don’t really feel the lives they’ve lived. It’s not within the appearing, not within the in any other case hanging set design, and definitely not within the writing, which has everybody declaring their emotions and aspirations to the varied sounding boards meant to move for supporting characters.
In one episode, Hampton has a heart-to-heart with an odd girl (Sunita Mani) caught in a vent. She’s implied to be some type of ethereal messenger, mysteriously vanishing as soon as Hampton appears to be like away. But she’s actually no completely different from the opposite, extra earthbound characters, as a result of their very own existences all appear to start and finish at what they’ll do for Hampton. His childhood good friend and recognized affiliate Bootsy (Bokeem Woodbine, who you may additionally acknowledge from a season of Fargo) merely palms him a automobile, hoping to lure him again to a lifetime of crime however in any other case with no strings hooked up. The youngest Prevost brother, Jean-Guy (Louis Cancelmi), presents to cancel Hampton’s debt in change for the self-sharpening drill, after which exits the entire center of the sequence whereas Hampton thinks on it.
What actually spoils Government Cheese, although, is simply how protected it manages to be in its reheated imitation. Here is a present for anybody who ever wished that the Coens would tone down their abrasive weirdos, or that Wes Anderson would sit back with the fussy aesthetics. Hampton doesn’t react with anger or disbelief towards his household’s chilly reception of him – Oyelowo is given no materials which may endanger our sympathy for him. Even when he’s extra overtly conniving, he operates solely at a low, boring hum of protagonist likability. Harrison needles him about all of the “Yahweh stuff” (which Hampton prefers to the extra formal title of “God”), however his newfound religion hardly ever comes up. Here’s a man who thinks God has given him a mission, but he goes for lengthy stretches with out speaking about it in any respect. He doesn’t proselytize, doesn’t yammer on about Yahweh’s plan, doesn’t even corral his youngsters into going to church.
For a short while, I puzzled if this was intentional, an expression of how flimsy and self-serving Hampton’s religion is. But the handful of seemingly divine occurrences in Government Cheese merely reveal its lack of creativeness, grounding any flights of fancy by tagging them with a believable clarification. No unusual happenings might merely exist as an expression of character and circumstance. The Lord must be giving Hampton an indication, and the vent woman must be some ethereal messenger setting him straight. If Government Cheese gained’t take an opportunity on making us disapprove of Hampton’s actions, why wouldn’t it ask us to droop our disbelief about his state of affairs, too?
