80 TIME June 20/June 27, 2022
LIVE LONG ENOUGH, AND CIRCUM-
stances will force you to take stock of
the big decisions you’ve made. Did they
turn out how you’d expected? What did
you sacrifi ce? Whom did you hurt, and
was the pain you infl icted on others, or
the pain you caused yourself, worth it?
For the title character of FX’s The
Old Man, known as Dan Chase (among
other aliases) and played by a weath-
ered to perfection Jeff Bridges, that
overdue moment of reckoning has fi -
nally come. A rogue CIA agent who has
been hiding off -grid but in plain sight
for decades, he is haunted by night-
mare visions of his late wife—and by
his paranoid conviction that he’s suf-
fering from a cognitive decline similar
to the one she experienced. It turns out
that the real threat to his life is exter-
nal, emerging without warning from
his past to put him back on the run and
endanger his connection with his adult
daughter. But what makes this adapta-
tion of Thomas Perry’s 2017 best seller
more than just another boomer action-
adventure epic is its interrogation of
the selfi sh, destructive, and self-righ-
teous Chase’s claim to heroism.
His survival has come at a high
cost to the people around him. One
such person is Harold Harper (John
Lithgow), a former colleague turned
adversary at the agency who has
ascended to a top position at the FBI
and is called in to lead a manhunt
for the fugitive Chase. Lithgow,
portraying an erudite company
man with an adoring protégé (Alia
Shawkat), makes the ideal foil for
Bridges, whose all but feral Chase
can still switch on the rugged charm
when necessary. Harold’s ambivalence
about capturing his old cohort adds
pathos to the beautifully shot show’s
many imaginative action scenes. In
cozy homes as well as in dark, deserted
stretches of road, Bridges—who in
real life is a 72-year-old lymphoma
stop talking about her ex. Yet as she
becomes entangled in Chase’s crisis,
the character deepens, and what ini-
tially comes across as a thoughtless,
one-dimensional depiction from cre-
ators Jonathan E. Steinberg and Robert
Levine gains purpose. Zoe becomes an
avatar for everyone Chase has endan-
gered to serve his own aims. During
one tense sequence, he envisions how
he might escape apprehension by kill-
ing her and fl eeing the scene.
The question that coalesces, mid-
way through the season, applies to so
many stories about the lone action he-
roes whom viewers never stop rooting
for, even when their crusades leave an
enormous body count: Why should
one troubled man’s continued survival
justify so much suff ering? It takes on
extra urgency in the case of Chase, who
has already lived a full life, made some
catastrophic choices, and whose mo-
tivations may turn out to be more per-
sonal than political. Maybe, The Old
Man suggests, there are more impor-
tant things than survival.THE OLD MANpremieres June 16 on FXREVIEW
An Old Man on the
run from a lifetime
of bad choices
BY JUDY BERMAN
TIME OFF TELEVISION
survivor— believably vanquishes, or
at least evades, pursuers half his age.AS EXCITING AS The Old Man gener-
ally is in the four episodes provided
for review (out of seven total), it’s
also too sloppy to be a great political
thriller. There are plot twists that cre-
ate plot holes big enough to pilot a C-5
through. It takes a frustratingly long
time to get a sense, via fl ashbacks to
his CIA tenure, of who Chase is, what
matters to him, and what he did to
blow up his life all those years ago—
suspense that doesn’t serve much of
a thematic purpose.
The show fl irts with sexism. In
the course of his journey, the wid-
ower meets a divorced woman, Amy
Brenneman’s Zoe, who seems des-
perate for companionship and can’tWhy should one
man’s survival
justify so much
suff ering?△
Fugitive Dan Chase (Bridges) fl ees the feds, fl anked
by his loyal attack dogs, Dave and CarolF X