‘Parish’ The Thought

Watching ‘Parish’, a new AMC drama series, feels like you’re stuck in a dimly lit New Orleans bar after drinking one too many hurricanes. Everything’s sweaty, the patrons are speaking in ridiculous clichés, and the whole scene depresses. Blasts of jazz from an aging boom box behind the bartender sound funereal. Even the engaging taxi-company owner you meet, Gray Parish (Giancarlo Esposito), can’t hold your attention for too long. You feel bad for him. It might be a long time before this charming man leaves this place and he’s so much better than this crowd. 

The man who we’ll forever know as Breaking Bad’s best villain Gus Fring returns to AMC’s Sunday night lineup in a lugubrious mess of a show. With its on-the-nose name – he’s in New Orleans and his name is Parish, get it? – and dated premise, this show appears to have been plucked from a pool of ideas from the mid 2010s, which makes a lot of sense because it’s based on a three-episode BBC One series The Driver, which aired in 2014.

In stretching that material to six episodes presumably meant to kickstart a four- or five-season run, Parish struggles badly in its first few episodes to dodge plotholes and to give its central character enough life to keep us interested.

Esposito plays the owner of a failing high-end black-car driving service that Uber and Lyft are driving into the ground. He has a loving wife (Paula Malcomson of Deadwood fame), a daughter he’s struggling to connect with, and an increasingly unsustainable lifestyle; his wife wants to put their home up for sale and get a smaller place.

Parish is also carrying a fuckton of grief. His beloved son died in a carjacking gone wrong the year before and since then he’s been obsessively trying to solve that crime while keeping his business afloat. Everything goes wrong when Parish’s good buddy Colin (Skeet Ulrich) shows up asking for a favor. The two used to do crimes together, you see, until Parish went legit. Now, this one last job is sucking him back in to the grimy underworld.

You see where this is going, right? It wouldn’t be much of a dark AMC  drama if bodies didn’t start piling up and our hero didn’t end up in one mess after another. But whereas shows like AMC’s peak TV successes Breaking Bad and Mad Men put its leading men into unpredictable messes and then found clever ways to get them out, Parish bogs down with bad ideas, clunky dialogue, ponderous religious imagery, and so, so many flashbacks.

Parish soon finds himself caught between the established (read: white) crime lords of New Orleans, including an entertaining Bradley Whitford, and South African siblings led by The Horse (Zackary Momoh) who provide human trafficking services.

Except for the laudable fact that it’s a mainstream show with Black actors in many of the lead roles, Parish is everything you’ve seen before. The sad dad trying to stay ahead of the mob, the long-suffering but supportive wife, the rebellious teenager, and criminals who talk about honor and family and then undercut everything they’ve said with their actions a scene or two later: these all feel like plot threads from TV we watched a decade ago.

The only thing that’s fresh is Esposito’s performance, in which he gets to break out of the smooth-cold-mastermind box. Parish has moments where he can threaten and take charge, but for much of the show’s first few episodes, he acts terrified and emotional. A car chase that opens the show before its unfortunate “7 Days Ago” flashback features Parish driving a Porsche not as a cool driving machine, but as a scared, aging man yelling out, “Oh no!” and “look out!” as I often do while driving on the nearest megahighway.

Esposito works hard to make his driver character relatable and multidimensional, but he bumps up against a show that saddles him with piss-poor dialogue such as, “I’m tired of being the passenger in my own life.” 

Things could improve, but for now, Parish is under construction. You should avoid it unless a humorless, obvious crime drama is the destination you seek.