Bloodline: A family drama gets swamped in the telling

The Binge
Jessica Zafra

FLASH-FORWARD is the new flashback. On every episode of Bloodline, we are reminded that the good son John Rayburn (Kyle Chandler) will dispose of the body of the bad son Danny Rayburn (Ben Mendelsohn) on a boat in the Florida Keys. Did John kill Danny? The very first words we hear on the show are: “Sometimes, you know something’s coming. You feel it in the air. In your gut… Something’s going to go terribly wrong.” The opening credit sequence says as much: clear blue skies over a sun-bleached beach giving way to dark clouds, thunder, lashing rain. Accompanied by a cover of a Metallica song. “Please don’t judge us,” says John. “We’re not bad people, but we did a bad thing.”

Oh, really? We would never have guessed. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Bloodline is about the Rayburns, proprietors of a beach resort and pillars of the community. When the series opens they’re having a big family reunion, and the patriarch Robert (Sam Shepard) and matriarch Sally (Sissy Spacek) are informally crowned king and queen of the Keys. Read: Shiny family, dark secrets. The Rayburns have four children who bear absolutely no resemblance to each other, so I thought the secret was that they were all adopted. Danny, the eldest, is a screw-up who had to be sent bus fare so he could come home. Yes, he is the black sheep, and given the show’s structure, he is Schroedinger’s sheep, both alive and dead.

John, a detective and sheriff’s deputy, is happily married with children. Meg (Linda Cardellini), a lawyer, is engaged to John’s partner Marco Diaz (Enrique Murciano), but having furtive sex in the car with her client. Kevin (Norbert Leo Butz) is a struggling businessman, a hothead who’s having marital problems. The show hints at some dark secret — is there any other kind — in the past that shaped their characters and leads directly to the dark secret of the more recent past. Or the near future, I’m getting confused.

Danny’s arrival shakes things up, and it’s a good thing because he makes the show worth watching. He decides to stick around, gets involved in criminal activities, rakes up the past and makes everyone uncomfortable. Danny is especially disturbing when he’s being nice: you just know he has an agenda. As the prodigal son, the Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn (Animal Kingdom, the forthcoming Rogue One: A Star Wars Story) is such a vital presence that he erases nearly everyone else from the frame. Danny is lovable and infuriating at the same time: you know he’s playing you, but he seems so contrite and reformed that you let him. We all know people like that, and we enable them.

The only one who can stand up to Danny is his brother, John. It’s a clever bit of casting for Kyle Chandler, who started out on TV as the guy who gets the day’s newspaper in advance from a cat (Early Edition) and went on to glory in Friday Night Lights. As the supposed straight arrow, Chandler exudes decency, solid values, and crushing guilt. He carries his guilt like his paunch, and his hypertension confirms it. The guiltier he feels, the more he justifies his decisions. In the face of Mendelsohn’s ferocious performance, Chandler plants himself on the ground and refuses to be blown away. The best parts of Bloodline are the confrontations between the two brothers — you can see what’s going on in each man’s mind.

Bloodline, created by the team behind the Glenn Close legal drama Damages, has some things to say about family dynamics but takes too long to say them. With due respect to Tolstoy, not all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way: there are only so many kinds of domestic dysfunction (though Arrested Development came up with some new ones). I saw the first season of Bloodline several months ago, and I still can’t decide if I like the show. It’s impressive, there’s a lot of dramatic tension, and I’m as devoted to Sissy Spacek as anyone who saw Brian De Palma’s Carrie as a child. I’ll watch anything Chloe Sevigny is in, though I wonder what she’s doing in such a small, insignificant role.

The cinematography by Jaime Reynoso is gorgeous and evocative — you can feel the heat and humidity, and everyone is covered in a sheen of sweat. However, Bloodline is a test of patience. I felt compelled to finish it, but when I got to the end I had to ask, “That’s it?” The buildup is not commensurate to the payoff. They don’t tell us everything. And having killed off the most interesting character on the show, the writers introduce a twist which exists only to keep us watching for another season.

Why does the show keep flashing forward to dead Danny? First, because that’s the hook. Here’s this guy, you love him and hate him, he’s going to get whacked, but why and how? You can’t leave, you still don’t know what happened to him.

Second, because there are 13 episodes and the makers have to remind us why we’re watching this languid, ponderous story. There are subplots, well-made but essentially filler. You can feel the time passing while you watch the show, then you realize with a shock that you’re only three episodes in. It’s a Netflix series, so all of the season’s episodes are available at once. The Netflix model has liberated us from time slots and given rise to the contemporary pastime, binge-watching. But Bloodline is not a series for bingeing. It’s a slog that depends on the main mystery to give it a sense of urgency. If Bloodline were a regular TV series, would we have the patience to sit down and watch it every week?

The entire second season of Bloodline is now available on Netflix.

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