Netflix loves to promote its own original shows. And why not? It has a lot of good ones, including top-tier police procedurals like Mindhunter.
But Netflix also has a ton of licensed content that comes and goes from the streamer, and some of it is just as good as anything produced in-house. And some of it is like Prodigal Son, which may not be technically as good as the best originals Netflix have to offer, but is so entertaining and demented it doesn’t really matter.
Prodigal Son deserves a second look
Never a dull moment in this family
Prodigal Son ran on Fox for two seasons, from 2019 to 2021. It’s about a young profiler named Malcolm Bright (Tom Payne) who gets fired from the FBI for insubordination. He’s hired on as a consultant for the NYPD by Lieutenant Gil Arroyo (Lou Diamond Phillips), who’s known Malcolm since he was a kid and is a kind of father figure to him. Thus begins Malcolm’s professional and personal rehabilitation, right?
Here comes the twist: Malcolm’s real surname isn’t Bright, it’s Whitly. He changed it because he’s actually the son of infamous serial killer Martin Whitly (Michael Sheen), a former cardiothoracic surgeon who is currently serving life in prison for murdering almost two dozen people. He was arrested when Michael was just a kid, and the experience of growing up with a psychotic father has messed Malcolm up to the point where he has to sleep chained to his bed lest he end up hurting himself during his night terrors.
That’s the kind of histrionic detail that takes what could be a normal police procedural and elevates it into something a little more strange, high-strung, and almost campy. Naturally, Malcolm ends up consulting with his father on cases he works for the NYPD, which gives the two a chance to bond even as Malcolm is terrified he might be like his dad in some way. It’s The Silence of the Lambs meets Frasier. It shouldn’t work but it does, thanks in large part to a magnetic performance by Michael Sheen, who you may also know from movies like The Queen, Frost/Nixon, or the Twilight saga, or TV shows like Good Omens. Martin isn’t always onscreen, but we’re always hoping he will be soon. We also get to know Malcolm’s heiress mother Jessica (Bellamy Young), his journalist sister Ainsley (Halston Sage), as well as his coworkers in the NYPD.
Prodigal Son is exciting, bloody, dramatic, and borderline insane
It’s just crazy enough to work
So Prodigal Son is part detective procedural, part family drama, and part lunatic fever dream. It’s a show that straddles the line between gritty network procedural and prestige drama. Episode to episode, it behaves much like your average cop show, with Malcolm and co. solving new cases more or less every week. But it’s made with more craft than your average procedural, with photography that evokes the clinical creepiness of a film like David Fincher’s Se7en. And it has big-name actors like Dermot Mulroney, Alan Cumming, and Catherine Zeta-Jones stopping by to play recurring roles, in addition to Sheen and Diamond Phillips already being part of the main cast.
And there’s the pretense of exploring the deep psychological toll that being a serial killer’s child takes on you. And to its credit, the show does go there; Prodigal Son serves up some very disturbing imagery, getting way more gruesome and gory than most network TV shows. But it also spreads on several layers of daffiness and cheese. For instance, in the series premiere, Malcolm and his coworkers must deal with a man strapped to a time bomb. Malcolm frees him by chopping off his hand with an axe, putting the man’s severed hand in a cooler. Later, he lugs the cooler to an ambulance and says, “I’ve got to give them a hand.”
If you laughed at that, this is the show for you. If you groaned, it still might be.
And some of the cases are nuts. In one episode, there’s a killer obsessed with The Count of Monte Cristo who’s visiting different kinds of poetic justice upon a wealthy family. In another, Malcolm investigates a case where a woman is beheaded by a guillotine and her boyfriend bricked up alive inside a room. There are a lot more serial killers on the loose than you’d think based on the news, and sometimes the show plays with the idea of making Martin the “good” serial killer fighting against “bad” ones in a way that recalls a show like Dexter. That’s a hard balancing act to pull off, and there are times when Prodigal Son doesn’t seem like it’s going to do it, but it always comes through. After all, the Dexter franchise is still going strong two decades in, so clearly it’s possible.
Prodigal Son was taken before its time
But it’s still worth watching
But Prodigal Son wasn’t as lucky as Dexter. Fox canceled the show after two seasons, leaving us with 33 episodes to enjoy, all of them currently on Netflix.
Unfortunately, the show does end on a bit of a cliffhanger, as the relationship between Malcolm and Martin reaches a dangerous new stage. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth binging. After all, a TV show isn’t about what it’s about, but about how it’s about it. And Prodigal Son goes about things in a very interesting, you-have-to-see-it-to-believe-it kind of way.
6 detective shows sharper, stranger, and better than Sherlock
Sherlock is a fun show, but these detective series make it look like it’s playing cops and robbers.
For the more serious minded
Prodigal Son is a good show. To me, the zaniness — intentional or otherwise — is part of the charm, but there are series out there that play things a little more straight. For instance, if you’re looking for a prestige-coded detective series you can watch on Netflix, consider Dark Winds, which is a pleasurable without being a guilty pleasure.
- Release Date
-
2019 – 2020
- Network
-
The CW
- Showrunner
-
Chris Fedak
- Directors
-
Chris Fedak
- Writers
-
Chris Fedak
