UK TV review: The Comey Rule
Review Overview
Cast
8Chaos
8David Farnor | On 30, Sep 2020
In 2009, Billy Ray penned Captain Phillips, adapting the true story of stalwart, straight-laced captain whose life was thrown into disarray by a dangerous, unpredictable hijacking. It’s only fitting, then, that he should be the one to dramatise the story of Jim Comey, the former director of the FBI, whose impartial, apolitical position throughout the 2016 US election was thrown into disarray. By the end of the campaign season and Donald Trump’s inauguration, Comey was one of the most hated men in America – labelled the guy who got Trump elected.
Ray’s series takes us behind the headlines to show us the man who, in some ways, did do exactly as his moniker suggests. But rather than give us a biopic of the bureau veteran, the drama positions him as the opposite to Trump, framing the whole narrative around the collision of two contrasting forces. Indeed, it’s only fitting that the drama – released in four chapters by Sky Atlantic – was written as divided into two parts: before the election and after.
Before gives us a chance to get to know Comey, from his job interview with Barack Obama (The OA’s Kingsley Ben-Adir, who uncannily echoes the President’s cadences) to his tenure as the FBI’s top dog. He’s a kind, caring boss, someone who talks of idealism and moral values, of doing the right thing – when he stops people in the canteen queue to quiz them on why they came to work for the FBI, you get the impression he genuinely wants to know.
Jeff Daniels is superbly cast in the role, bringing the kind of noble streak to his portrayal that he’s honed over his years in The Newsroom and then fine-tuned in The Looming Tower. He’s perfect at playing patriots, able to be earnest yet understated, heroic yet crumped, polite yet almost smug in his self-assured righteous values.
Enter Brendon Gleeson, who turns everything up to 11 to play Donald Trump. It’s a barn-storming turn, imitating Trump’s petulant tone and erratic behaviour with a performance that’s as wild and lively as his wig. The pair are surrounded by a who’s who of Hollywood, from Scoot McNairy and Michael Kelly to Jonathan Banks and Holly Hunter. The one weakness of Showtime’s drama is that it’s so packed with big names that it can be easy to play spot the A-lister rather than let the familiar faces disappear behind their real life people. But Gleeson’s larger-than-life screen presence plays into that beautifully, capturing Trump as a grotesque figure, a monstrously inhuman villain (with the exception of one dubious bit involving a glass of water), who first looms as a silhouette but, by the time he’s addressing the public in office, does so as a close-up face bellowing into the camera.
Ray’s drama works best as a two-man show, reminiscent of Frost/Nixon but a shade less subtle. These days, though, subtlety doesn’t feel right, with Trump too cartoonish in real life to be portrayed with any nuance. And the volume-set-to-loud recreation of the 2016 election conveys the chaos of what happened, from the media circus to the apparent Russian interference, all of it centred around the allegations of improper use of personal emails by Hillary Clinton.
Comey’s determination to avoid being partisan in the run-up to the national vote is the driving force of what follows, and Ray expertly observes the way in which the very rug of the system was pulled out from under Comey’s feet – a sense of disorientation that also underpinned the legal drama The Good Fight. Over the course of four hours, the notion of integrity falls by the wayside, and the concept of impartiality only leads to accusations of impropriety. Daniels comes to life in scenes where Comey frantically rushes to his desk after each meeting or phone call to scribble down memories of what happened. The result was Comey’s book A Higher Loyalty, which formed the basis of Ray’s series – that the book was a bestseller highlights the public’s appetite to relive the events of four years ago and piece together what happened and how. It’s no coincidence that the show should arrive now, weeks ahead of the next US election – it makes for timely and gripping, if politically traumatic, viewing.
The Comey Rule is available on Sky Atlantic. Don’t have Sky? You can also stream it on NOW, for £9.99 a month with no contract. For the latest Sky TV packages and prices, click the button below.