
The pilot of Netflixâs new family drama Bloodline pulls you deep into the swampy waters of the Rayburn family. Thereâs a lot of exposition, and even though the beautifully shot pilot teases multiple mysteries, it never reaches the thriller level its heightened voiceovers and narrative structure aspire to. But the groundwork laid here sturdy, especially when it comes to the seriesâ characters, played by such a stacked cast that the performances alone are nearly enough to make you crave more.
Right off the bat, middle son John Rayburn (Kyle Chandler) explains that the arrival of his screw-up older brother Danny (Ben Mendelsohn) spells doom for the Rayburn family. Danny takes his time revealing the true reason for his return to the Keys: He wants to return home for good and help out with the familyâs hotel business. The way John and his other siblingsâMeg (Linda Cardellini) and Kevin (Norbert Leo Butz)âtalk and move around Danny convey the weight of his return and the past pains he has inflicted, although the specifics remain, for now, unknown.
Itâs nearly impossible to not think of Bloodline creators Todd A. Kessler, Glenn Kessler, and Daniel Zelmanâs previous work on the legal thriller Damages. Though Bloodline trades in the legal formalities in favor of more intimate family drama, the nonlinear trajectory of the pilot contains Damages DNA. Bloodline already shows much more restraint with such narrative trickery. Damages twisted itself into a narrative pretzel, which began as its strength and eventually turned into its downfall. Bloodline jumps forward and backward but not nearly as often as Damages, and even though John and Danny hint at secrets throughout the pilot, the story seems more invested in the present and in the deeply rooted family drama than in reveals and mystery, making it more personal and grounded than Damages.
But that same restraint also works against Bloodline. At times, getting through the pilot feels a little like John slogging through the swamp. Zelman and the Kesslers wrote a pilot ready for the binge-viewing world before binge-viewing was a thing with Damages, but that same urgency isnât quite there for Bloodline yet. The pilot doesnât bore, but it doesnât quite hit hard enough to make you wholly compelled to let autoplay do its thing and take you to the next one.
The pilot feels disjointed as it oscillates between the more compelling family drama and larger thriller elements that feel out of place. Johnâs job as a sheriff leads him to late-night crime scene where he finds a dead teenaged girl. âItâs going to be a long night,â John sighs, but the episode immediately cuts to the sunny sands of the Rayburn hotel, and the dead girl is quickly forgotten. If their work on Damages is any indication, the Kesslers and Zelman are just taking their time with how this will eventually connect to the showâs larger framework. Iâm all for careful storytelling and relaxed pacing, but throwing a random dead girl in your pilot reeks of the unsettling pattern in thriller pilots that Kroll Showâs Dead Girl Town so deftly parodies. There seems to be this misguided notion that establishing your series as a Serious Show means you have to have a pretty corpse show up in your pilot. We never even learn the name of the girl in the swamp, and while it might be tonally connected, the scene is narratively detached from the rest of the pilot.
So while its mystery elements donât quite hook, Bloodlineâs best bait right now is its characters. The pilot establishes the overarching conflict of the story through the relationships between Danny and the rest of the family. The pilot turns on the siblingsâ decision process as they weigh whether to let Danny back into their lives again. And the writers take their time parsing out the intricacies of this decision. Thereâs a two-minute scene of just the siblings fighting with Danny about letting his girlfriend Sheryl sit at the family table at the Rayburnâs annual celebration. Thatâs a lot of time to spend on a dispute over seating politics, but of course, itâs about more than just who sits where, and itâs really the actors who unearth those deeper truths than the writing. Chandler, Butz, Cardellini, and Mendelsohn elevate the script, revealing the pain Danny has caused and where they all fall on the should-he-stay-or-should-he-go spectrum without talking about it directly.
A lot of the pilotâs quieter, slower scenes are heightened by its actors. A lot of Bloodlineâs buzz has centered on the cast, which includes so many heavy-hitters and big namesâincluding Sissy Spacek and Sam Shepard as the heads of the Rayburn familyâthat it sounds more like the lineup for an upcoming film than a Netflix series. Mendelsohn is particularly suited for his character, capturing Dannyâs volatility with subtle physical choices. The scene where he tells Johnâs wife Diana (Jacinda Barrett) about a woman who asked him to hit her during sex unnerves deeply. And Chandler settles comfortably into the role of John, who is in every way opposite of Danny. Heâs the family fixer, and Chandler possesses Johnâs quiet but firm energy with ease. The family tiesâboth the strong and the severedâof Bloodline are, as the title suggests, the foundation of the showâs perspective. But in order for the series to fully earn the pilotâs literally explosive reveal, the writers need to strike the right balance between building thrills and character work.
Stray observations:
- Hello and welcome to daily reviews of Bloodline. People will undoubtedly be watching at different paces, so try to be respectful to other commenters by keeping your comments confined to the particular episode being reviewed. And if you do end up talking about future episodes, just include a spoiler warning.
- Iâm one of those people who hates the use of voiceover in almost all instances (major exceptions being Arrested Development and Jane The Virgin). Here, I donât necessarily hate it, but I also donât think John has said much that really adds anything. In any case, itâs hard to complain about hearing Kyle Chandlerâs voice.
- So yeah, this is one of the best casts on television right now, but as fellow critic and friend David Sims pointed out, there are some glaring accent problems.
- Sheâs inexplicably not listed on Bloodlineâs IMDb page, so maybe sheâs only in the pilot, but Iâve been watching television for long enough to feel my blood pressure rise whenever Mia Kirshner shows up. Donât get me wrong; I think Kirshner is as good an actor as the rest of the cast, but boy oh boy does she play some loathsome and sometimes literally evil characters. In the year 2015, I still suffer from Jenny Schecter flashbacks.