the times | Saturday December 4 2021 saturday review 7Despite all this, Chucky works rather
well, with the doll coming first to embody
then pervert Jake’s desire for revenge. In
episode one there’s a tremendous sequence
in which he slags off everybody at a school
show, but in a manner that makes every-
body think Jake is a highly impressive ven-
triloquist. At that point I was definitely
Team Chucky. Then came the deaths,
whereupon things got more nuanced.My colleague Sathnam Sanghera’s series
Empire State of Mind concluded on Satur-
day, with Sathnam continuing to patiently
and doggedly make the case that the eter-
nal debate about the pluses and minuses
of the impact the British Empire had on
the rest of the world is, at least for us, less
important than understanding the impact
it had on Britain.
The most obvious impact, in this re-
spect, is the fundamental yet neglected
link between the Nationality Act of 1948,
which allowed former imperial subjects to
come to Britain, and the way that, subse-
quently, some of them did. What Sathnam
did so well, though, was tease out impacts
altogether more subtle. Such as, for exam-
ple, when he presented the far-right politi-
cian Anne Marie Waters with the parallels
between how she now speaks about Asian
immigrants with how people once spoke of
Irish immigrants, of which she herself is
one. It wasn’t so much that she disagreed,
but more that she couldn’t comprehend.
For me, though, the most powerful mo-
ment came when he visited the curator
Neil Curtis at Aberdeen University, who is
grappling with the moral legacy of some of
the imperial artefacts in the university’s
collection. One of them is a letter from a
British doctor, a Dr Robb, who compas-I
think it’s the “American” bit that
annoys me about American Rust.
What, even your rust is special
now? A show called French Rust
or, I don’t know, Azerbaijani
Rust would at least be making
a deliberate point about where
the damn rust was. “American”, though, is
an honorific. “Now you gotta take rust
seriously,” it says. “Now it’s American.
Woo-haa!”
Anyway, it’s set in the rust belt. Maybe
you got that? Specifically, we’re in Penn-
sylvania. If you have watched Mare of East-
town or Dopesick you will understand the
genre, which is one of people in the colder
bits of America being sad and economical-
ly struggling, albeit in a manner that still
lets them own a car and a relatively mas-
sive house. Jeff Daniels plays Del, the town
chief of police, admittedly in precisely the
same manner that Jeff Daniels plays liter-
ally everything else, but never mind that,
because who doesn’t love Jeff Daniels? He
has an on-again, off-again flirtation with
middle-aged single mum Grace, played by
Maura Tierney, likewise.
Grace has a son, young adult Billy (Alex
Neustaedter), who was once an American
football star but didn’t go to college for
Reasons. Billy is a bit of a hero, having
saved his friend Isaac (David Alvarez)
from drowning when he fell through a fro-
zen river of the sort these parts of America
inevitably have. Six months ago, though,
he also beat a guy senseless with a plank
outside a bar, in a manner that was fairly
heroic from the right angles, but not from
the wrong one, where somebody had a
smartphone, which is why he nearly went
to jail. That he didn’t was probably down to
the intervention of police chief Del, who is
a damn fine cop despite being addicted to
opiates and amphetamines, and also, as
mentioned, totally fancies his mum.
Right? With me so far? Well, one day the
other cop (now ex-cop) who arrested Billy
on the bar fight night turns up dead in a
factory. We know Billy and Isaac watched
him go into the factory alive, but we don’t
know what happened next.
One problem with American Rust, I sup-
pose, is that it takes a while to figure out
that this is the plot because there are all
sorts of other things going on. Another is
that it is just so obviously trying incredibly,
incredibly hard to tick every box of the
genre it is in, from drugs, to hot mums, to
miserable old people, and so on. A third is
that, of the various potential solutions to
the murder mystery at its heart, none of
them seems that interesting. Still, if diving
deep into cold, miserable America turns
you on — and I do, actually, understand
why it might — then hey, why not?Chucky is a lot more fun. A televisual
remake of the Child’s Play horror films
(dating from 1988) and made by the same
guy (Don Mancini), it is of course the story
of a possessed doll on a slasher rampage.
What with it not being 1988, though,
some updating has been required. For one
thing, nobody owns Cabbage Patch Kids
any more, and a possessed Pokémon or
Roblox character probably wouldn’t have
the required menace. So rather than being
a little kid, Chucky’s owner is now a troub-
led teenage artist called Jake (Zackary
Arthur) who is into retro-aesthetics and
enjoys making sculptures out of dismem-
bered baby dolls. His nasty cousin Junior
(Teo Briones) is the school alpha male and
his crush Devon (Bjorgvin Arnarson) is a
true crime podcaster, which might seem
like an odd hobby for a boy in his early
teens, but just go with it.
Jake is bullied at school, I think because
he’s gay, although Devon seems to be gay
too and nobody makes such a fuss. Jake
lives with his abusive father, who isn’t at all
happy about the gay thing and smashes
up all Jake’s sculptures with a baseball bat
because sticking together severed doll
parts is apparently the Gen Z equivalent of
liking musical theatre. Chucky, mean-
while, is possessed by the soul of a local
serial killer (I knew that true crime podcast
would come in useful), which has its down-
sides in terms of slaughter, but upsides in
the way he never needs new batteries.
I know Child’s Play was always meant to
be a satire as well as a horror, but I always
struggled to feel the requisite amount of
fear about a murderer you could drop-kick
or put in the microwave. Time, moreover,
seems to have neutered the once-powerful
eeriness of a sweet doll saying f***.Hugo Rifkind on TV
Struggling, but in a manner that
lets you own a massive house
sionately attended to an Indian holy man,
or sadhu, while he died. Another is that
sadhu’s skull, in a box. “So the doctor must
have decapitated the corpse and boiled the
head,” Sathnam said, actually quite mildly.
“I presume so,” Curtis said, and it seems
to me that you can approach this sort of
thing, today, in one of two ways. On the one
hand, perhaps you think the clear, stagger-
ing dehumanisation that a boiled head
represents has disappeared since then,
somehow, and is no longer worth even
thinking about. On the other hand, per-
haps you think there might still be some-
thing more complicated going on. And if
the latter, I’d say that’s the whole point.It tries hard
to tick every
box of the
genre it is in,
from drugs,
to hot mums,
to miserable
old people
tighten your belts Maura Tierney and Jeff Daniels in American RustMATTHIAS CLAMER/SHOWTIMEAmerican Rust
Sky Atlantic
Chucky
Sky Max
Empire State of Mind
Channel 4