John’s running for office is doubly complicated. It puts in him in cahoots with a local millionaire (Beau Bridges), a former “friend” of the family who agrees to fund his campaign, the why of which is revealed later in the season. It also forces him to cross swords with detective best friend Diaz, who starts to become increasingly curious about the Rayburn family because his boss, and the current sheriff, is egging him on to do so in typical conflict-of-interest politicking. There’s also a drug dealer, Wayne Lowery (Glenn Morshower), who has dirt on John which adds further complications.
The main issue of season one was an overly patient hand at storytelling. Season two is riddled with exasperating characters and too many all-too-convenient plot contrivances to bear. In reality, a lot of television behaves under the same formula, with new obstacles presented each week, leading to new solutions with each episode. But “Bloodline” overdoes it, the seams of the formulaic show and the strain of each twist and turn becoming all the more pronounced.
With Danny gone, youngest brother Kevin assumes the role of family fuck-up, and the writers fast-forward him to sniveling, stupid dipshit with a quickness. Granted, Kevin’s drinking, coke problems and overall cowardice never made him son of the year, but in season two, his stupid decisions escalate to incredulously dumb levels. (It’s a shock that every family member doesn’t slap him across the face “Airplane!” style several times per episode.) While he has an arc — trying to get clean while facing bankruptcy and becoming a father — Kevin largely serves to upend the narrative and constantly put the rest of the family in further danger with his asinine decisions. If this sounds deeply frustrating, that’s because it is.
Further aggravation is found in the catch-and-release array of conflicts, suspense and tension. Every character is squeezed into a situation that feels insurmountable and inevitable, but just as the scenario looks as bleak as possible, the writers drop some kind of deus ex machina — a villain is randomly killed, a woman who has spent the entire season trying to out her abusive husband recants her story — that acts like a grating and suspension-of-disbelief-breaking plot beat.
Critically, “Bloodline” always miscalculates audience sympathy towards its characters. Danny Rayburn was largely scum and such a venomous degenerate that many audiences cheered when John finally ended him (at least I did; I’d had enough of his deceptions). Similarly, Nolan is such an ungrateful lowlife, we don’t really care that deep down inside, he’s suffering from abandonment issues. And Kevin is such an idiot, he’s akin to a halfwit character in a horror movie that you yell at to not go in the basement. To the show’s credit, with all its family members, new characters, and even more that I haven’t mentioned, the plotting can be very dense and intricately layered, but it’s never difficult to follow.
The theme of season two — that the Rayburns’ legacy is not as pure as its mythic reputation suggests, and that Robert built his fortune on shady foundations — are hinted at but never satisfyingly explored. Other dangling threads abound: Lenny Potts (Frank Hoyt Taylor), the officer in charge of the case surrounding Sarah’s drowning 30 years ago, and brought in by Sally Rayburn (Sissy Spacek) to investigate Danny’s death, suddenly exits the entire show (because he was too close to pinning the murder on the family?).
“Bloodline” can successfully aggravate. Sally Rayburn, the matriarch of the family, is infinitely irritating in the way she constantly defends the worst members of her family and is incessantly suspicious of the most competent ones. But at least this is familiar in feeling and in keeping with mothers (and sometimes fathers) who feel a guilty need to overcompensate for the shortcomings of their weakest clan members. Another plus is Kyle Chandler, who reveals himself to be the lead character who was always there under Ben Mendelsohn’s Danny. And the way he conveys his character’s compartmentalization of lies, duplicity and loyalty towards his family is rich and moody stuff.
For all its hokey contrivances, “Bloodline” isn’t bad TV, and it can be compelling regardless. The show features great actors in a strong framework that suffers from transparently poor character-writing choices. But it’s not necessarily bingeworthy TV either, which these days is the litmus test for all programming in the medium. The plus side for “Bloodline”— and less a slag on the show and more one on our current cultural conversation — is that the bar for what constitutes prestige TV is low and the benchmark for what’s worthy of binge-watching appears to be even lower. “Bloodline” is also ostensibly about victimization. Danny remains a victim in death, and the family is always victimized by his presence and treachery. But the show’s escalating schemas also make a victim out of the audience. It’s never enough to kill the show, mind you, but it does prevent “Bloodline” from being the PeakTV A-lister Netflix desperately wants it to be. [C+]
