‘Class of ’09’: Brian Tyree Henry Deserves More Than This AI-Themed Misfire
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In the spring of 2020, a handful of shows developed to air on the basic cable channel FX instead debuted exclusively on Hulu. It was an attempt to better integrate different parts of the Disney corporate family in the aftermath of Disney acquiring most of Fox’s film and television assets, as well as an acknowledgment that more and more viewers were waiting to watch shows on streaming. Cutting out the legacy media middleman just seemed like a logical next step toward the medium’s future.
It was also, however, extremely confusing. Hulu was already making its own original series like The Handmaid’s Tale, developed by a completely different executive team than the one that had worked on FX’s straight-to-Hulu shows like Devs. Because FX had become one of TV’s most distinct and acclaimed brands over the past 20 years, the decision was made to place these shows under the new “FX on Hulu” banner. Eventually, that got shortened to a hub simply titled FX, on a service with a frustratingly byzantine interface. But because the FX-developed shows felt so different from the Hulu-developed ones — and because nearly all of FX’s new series from 2020 onward started going straight to Hulu(*) — it felt all but necessary to keep describing these series as “FX on Hulu,” or “an FX show that’s exclusive to Hulu,” and various other clumsy bits of phrasing.
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(*) The exceptions are largely new installments of franchises the debuted on the linear channels, like American Horror Story, and the occasional new show that seems likely to attract a demographic that hasn’t yet cut the cord in huge numbers, like The Old Man.
I bring all this up not to complain about an extremely minor, high-class TV critic problem, but to discuss the confusing experience of the new drama Class of ‘09, which has begun streaming today on Hulu. On the one hand, it is filled with FX alums: creator Tom Rob Smith previously wrote the Gianni Versace season of American Crime Story, star Brian Tyree Henry is just coming off of Atlanta, and star Kate Mara played the title character of the 2020 miniseries A Teacher. The show also features a fractured timeline, bouncing around between 2009, 2023, and 2034, two of them dealing with the kinds of questions about the perils of technology — all elements feeling on-brand for FX programming, regardless of where they premiere. Yet through its first four episodes, Class of ’09 feels oddly generic, as if it was either a lesser Hulu original, or one of the many broadcast network dramas that begin streaming on the service the day after they air on free TV. There are some solid performances, the technical elements are strong, and Smith asks some pertinent and timely questions about AI(*). But on the whole it comes in as pretty good, rather than great, and plays as more familiar than the norm for FX.
(*) Particularly since writers like him are currently on strike in part because of the threat AI poses to their profession.
Henry and Mara play Tayo and Poet, two members of the titular group of FBI trainees, part of an initiative by the Bureau to recruit people from outside the law-enforcement sphere. He was an insurance executive, she was a nurse, and classmates Hour (Sepideh Moafi) and Lennix (Brian J. Smith) were, respectively, an MIT graduate and a lawyer(*). Each episode bounces between three periods. In 2009, they are trainees eager to prove themselves. In the present, they are veteran agents assigned to different posts, but all involved in some way in fending off an imminent white nationalist threat. In the unsettling future of 2034, Tayo runs the Bureau using an AI program developed by Hour — who lives off the grid to avoid the police state he’s created with her work — while Poet wonders which of them she can still trust.
(*) There is a fifth trainee, Murphy, an ex-cop played by Jake McDorman. If you’ve also been watching him this spring on Peacock’s delightfully bonkers Mrs. Davis, there’s some unintentional amusement to be found in him once again being cast in a story about an all-powerful computer program. But Murphy appears so infrequently that he barely feels like part of the show.
Minus the quasi-dystopian future segment, this is more or less the set-up of ABC’s Priyanka Chopra Jonas drama Quantico when it debuted in the mid-2010s(*). Smith is using it in part to show the evolution of this foursome (Poet and Tayo in particular), in part to discuss the evolution of law-enforcement in ways good and bad, and the personal freedoms we are willing to give up for the sake of safety and/or some shiny new piece of tech.
(*) If we’re getting really TV nerdy, we could graft on the gimmick from a short-lived CBS cop show of roughly the same era: Golden Boy, in which the exploits of a rookie detective are contrasted with scenes of him in the future as commissioner of the NYPD.
It’s not hard to see what he’s aiming for, even if the results are mixed. The series seems at its most vibrant while following the rookies through Quantico, where they are schooled by Brooke Smith’s Drew and Jon Jon Briones’ Gabriel. Though the actors look indistinguishable from their 2023 selves, their performances create the illusion of the characters being more youthful, naive, and impressionable, and the character work is more effective. (The old-age makeup of the 2034 scenes is… adequate.) After a Poet-centric debut episode, the second installment focuses on Tayo, including 2009 scenes where he struggles with both a physical fitness requirement and the microaggressions of a racist classmate. Brian Tyree Henry is capable of doing so much more, but the quiet force of his performance here still lands.
There are some interesting touches to the 2034 segments, and the ways they show the intersection of tech and loss of civil liberties, like a scene where cops have probable cause for a traffic stop because their computers tell them that Poet is manually driving in a world where everyone uses a self-driving car. But whatever is gained by getting to see these people, and Hour’s algorithm, at multiple life stages is counterbalanced by how thin each timeline feels as Smith keeps toggling between them. A version of the story told in strictly chronological order would ironically play as even more traditional, but it might also allow each character and idea to be more fleshed-out than they are in this version. Because critics were given only part of the season, it’s hard to tell how well any of it will pay off. But at this point, my primary motivation for continuing would be a desire to watch more of Henry and Mara, rather than any investment in the plots.
The FX brand — or FX on Hulu, or FX-Developed Shows That Premiere On Hulu, or whatever we want to call it — is certainly not perfect. Sometimes, you’ll get The Bear or Fleishman Is in Trouble. Other times, you’ll get Kindred or The Premise. But usually even the bad ones feel like they belong under this particular umbrella. If not for the creator and the two leads, Class of ‘09 wouldn’t provide any explanation for why it’s an FX show, even if it’s also a Hulu show. Or… you get it. Even if I don’t.
The first two episodes of Class of ‘09 are streaming now on Hulu, with additional ones releasing weekly. I’ve seen the first four.
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