Given the tough act it gave itself to follow after a sterling debut season, it’s no surprise The Old Man loses a step in its second and final year — especially given how beset it was by production difficulties over its short run. With shooting delays caused at various times by COVID, the Hollywood writer’s strike, and the leading man’s cancer diagnosis, the real surprise may simply be that it made it to viewers at all. Alas, what began as a sensational series sputters to a middling, unresolved ending.
Drawing magical performances out of its leads, the first season of The Old Man introduced us to Dan Chase (Jeff Bridges), a retired CIA officer with a storied history in Afghanistan. Chase’s closet skeletons pry him out of retirement when assassins invade his home in rural Vermont. His subsequent fight for survival entangles him romantically with the formidable Zoe McDonald (Amy Brenneman), and steers him and his daughter, FBI agent Angela (Alia Shawkat), back into his past, where his career as a field agent entwined him with local warlord Faraz Hamzad (Navid Negahban). Season two fills in this backstory further, with the kidnapped Angela belatedly learning that she is in fact Hamzad’s daughter, just in time for an internecine power struggle over a massive lithium deposit to situate her in the crosshairs of rival groups. Chase and his former colleague-slash-rival Harold Harper (John Lithgow) infiltrate dangerous territory to rescue her, but newfound connections with her birth family steer her life on a different trajectory, taking Chase, Harper, and Zoe with her.
Season two is far from a debacle, but the early magic is definitely gone, perhaps used up in a first season that should have been a limited series. Did it stretch too much attempting to wring a franchise out of the source material? Was season one’s co-writer Robert Levine the secret sauce that helped the earlier scripts sing, his departure here thus missed? Whatever the reason, the show feels much less special during this stint, despite residual traces of its past eloquence and game performances from Bridges, Lithgow, Shawkat, Negahban, Gbenga Akinnagbe, and the rest of the more-than-capable cast. Alas, for a show that made such a huge splash, The Old Man ultimately doesn’t leave much of a ripple.
