'Hap and Leonard': Texas Good Ol' Boys In A Noir Crime Series
A suspense series about an odd-couple of crime-solving Texas good o’ boys, Hap and Leonard, premiering Wednesday on SundanceTV, has a lot going for it. Leonard is played by Michael K. Williams, from Boardwalk Empire and immortal as Omar in The Wire. Hap is played by James Purefoy, an actor who deserved a better role than he got as an exhausting psycho in The Following. The show is based on characters created by the fine thriller writer Joe R. Lansdale — I’ve read a couple of his Hap and Leonard books as well as other Lansdale novels and can attest to the author’s unpredictable narrative drive. Finally, the show was developed by Nick Damici and Jim Mickle, who adapted Lansdale’s novel Cold In July into a very fine 2014 B-movie starring Michael C. Hall and Don Johnson.
The plot of the TV show involves pulling Hap and Leonard into a search for some money that was lost years ago, stashed in a car that’s probably at the bottom of a river. The person doing the pulling is Hap’s ex-wife, Trudy, played by Christina Hendricks. If you thought Mad Men made a fetish of showcasing Hendricks’s curves, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet — every time Trudy appears on-screen here, men seem barely capable of keeping saliva in their mouths, and all eyes, including the camera’s, cannot swerve from Trudy’s posterior.
Trudy brings Hap and Leonard aboard to help yet another of her ex-husbands and his friends locate the buried treasure. They prove to be a bunch of aging radicals, former members of the Mechanics, a made-up splinter-group of the late-’60s/early-’70s revolutionary group the Weathermen. The series goes out of its way to sneer at counterculture radical politics, something I didn’t detect in my reading of Lansdale, but maybe I wasn’t paying attention when I was enjoying his prose.
In any case, the show is a mite too pleased with itself that Leonard is a black, gay, Vietnam War-vet, politically-conservative man who speaks highly of Ronald Reagan — it turns Leonard into more of an exotic type than the man deserves, and Williams does his best to transcend the anti-cliché clichés of this characterization. Given all this, I was a little let down by Hap and Leonard. Its narrative moves very slowly in the three episodes made available to critics, with a third-episode revelation that anyone who’s seen a thriller before will know is coming way before it registers with the folks on-screen.
The show has atmosphere aplenty — that’s one excellent quality it shares with Mickle and Damici’s Cold In July; Hap and Leonard could use more of that film’s tightly-coiled suspense. Which it indeed may come to have as the series progresses. I’ll look at the other three episodes of the six-episode first season when they air, because I’d really like to see Lansdale get a TV series worthy of his work.
Hap and Leonard airs Wednesdays at 10 p.m. on the SundanceTV.
