'American Odyssey' Is Smart, Tough, and Bleak
A tough-minded melodrama that’s uneven but never less than intelligent, American Odyssey keeps its best subplot front and center. A member of a U.S. Special Ops team, played by Pushing Daisies’s Anna Friel, is the lone survivor of a massacre in North Africa. The appalling thing is, her unit wasn’t attacked by any foreign enemy, but by an American-backed private security team, doing the bidding of — well, that’s where the vast corruption-conspiracy aspect of this new series kicks in.
Friel is excellent as Sgt. Odelle Ballard, fighting to get back home to America and her family. Odyssey’s other subplots include Nurse Jackie’s Peter Facinelli as a former United States attorney turned corporate drone, who uncovers some treasonous dealings-for-profit and a highly organized cover-up.
Related: 5 Things to Know About NBC’s ‘American Odyssey’
Odyssey has a lot to say about our country’s fight against Al Qaeda and the blind eye we turn to corporate malfeasance. These two elements come together in repeated tragedies: innocent deaths, families torn asunder, cynicism sown among decent people.
Initially, American Odyssey can seem like a cross between Homeland and the feature film Traffic, with overlapping and intersecting plots that hopscotch across the globe. But as the series proceeds, the drama becomes more sleek and propulsive, and in doing so, its themes become all the more frightening. I have a feeling not too many citizens are going to want to sit down on a Sunday night at 10 p.m. to have the bleak sentiments of American Odyssey poured into their eyes and ears, but it’s not this good show’s fault that it has a tough time period. Give it a try.
American Odyssey airs Sundays at 10 p.m. on NBC.
