‘Shut Eye’: Psychic Shenanigans
After breaking free from the constraints of episodic television with a terrifically eccentric turn in the latest season of Fargo, Jeffrey Donovan (Burn Notice) straps himself back into a new series with a gimmick, Shut Eye, which begins airing Wednesday on Hulu. Donovan plays Charlie Haverford, who runs tarot card readings and psychic scams on people in various fortune-telling storefronts scattered around Los Angeles. His wife, Linda (Private Practice’s KaDee Strickland), is a tougher customer, more ambitious for bigger scores. Shut Eye, created by writer-producer Leslie Bohem, takes you into its confidence to show you how psychics work some of their tricks, and suggests that this mini-industry is run by don’t-call-them-gypsies-they’re-Romas, who have Charlie and Linda under their thumb. (The matriarch of the organization they work for is played by no one less than Isabella Rossellini, who seems to be having fun slumming in this tough-broad role.)
The Haverfords have two kids, so there’s an element of domestic drama in Shut Eye, and one of Charlie’s clients is a gangster (Dexter’s David Zayas), and as Charlie tells Linda, “It’s good to have a gangster on our side.” This is especially true since Charlie plans to break loose from the agreement he has with his psychic syndicate and go freelance, which we know will result in some form of retribution from the Romas. Have I conveyed the idea that Shut Eye is kinda all over the place? I haven’t even mentioned that Charlie gets conked on his noggin in the opening episode, which leaves him wondering if he may have acquired some real psychic abilities.
Donovan works a lot of the strutting charm that served him so well in Burn Notice, but Charlie is a less interesting character than Linda, whom creator Bohem has filled with a greater degree of complexity. (Indeed, the women here come off more interesting than the men: There’s also a nice role for The Americans’ Susan Misner as a sharp-witted neuroscientist diagnosing Charlie’s injury.) It would help if, in the early episodes, Shut Eye would make more clear what tone it wants to take: hard-boiled action, lighthearted caper, dark drama with some fantastical elements. When Shut Eye focuses on the often separate-but-equal storylines of Linda and Charlie, it’s intriguing; the more it peels off into a tedious storyline about their son’s high school life or the illegal doings of Rossellini’s gangster empire or the strong-arm tactics of the gangster (you’ll wince at a death-by-boiling-oil in a doughnut shop), the more diffuse the series becomes.
Shut Eye begins streaming Wednesday on Hulu.
