'Manhattan' Review: It's The Bomb

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Manhattan, the WGN series about the Manhattan Project’s creation of the atomic bomb you never knew you wanted to watch, is back for a second season on Tuesday night, with even more reasons to check it out.

New characters help. William Petersen, fresh from his invigorating swan song on CSI, is introduced in the season premiere playing Colonel Emmett Darrow, who believes the atom bomb is nothing less than divine intervention in a war against Nazi evil. It’s nice to have someone around in Manhattan who represents what is, to say the least, a non-scientific point of view — and Petersen, his hair a steely white, thunders like a god himself.

Also good, in only brief glimpses in the first four episodes, are Neve Campbell, playing the luckless wife of Daniel London’s eerily chilly J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Griffin Dunne, giving fresh energy to the tired-cliché role of a boozy reporter. The season moves our sallow band of physicists out of the realm of theory and closer to the actual construction of The Bomb, with all its fraught moral implications. And no one struggles with the morality of his work more than the show’s central figure, Dr. Frank Winter (John Benjamin Hickey). Even when Manhattan’s first season slowed to a snail’s pace mid-way through, I remained hooked on any scene with Hickey, and especially any moment he had with the marvelous Olivia Williams, who plays Winter’s wife, Liza. Hickey and Williams are individually fascinating actors who together heighten the dramatic stakes of even the most incidental domestic scene, investing their work with a Eugene O’Neill-heaviness that soars — I think that’s something of a miracle.

Show creator Sam Shaw and producer-director Thomas Schlamme have managed to give Manhattan a narrative momentum that was by no means baked in to the concept of scientists poring over chalkboards dusty with recondite formulae and squabbling for the credit of theoretically blowing up the world. In a TV world with so many choices, Manhattan is at least worth seeking out, to see if its kind of tense smartness appeals to you.

Manhattan airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. on WGN America.