There’s a reason why Showtime cancelled American Rust after its first, mixed-to-negatively-reviewed season; aside from the usual stellar performances by Daniels and Tierney, the show felt like a dark slog packed with people who had sketchy morals and little else in the way of personal characteristics. Despite that, Amazon saw fit to pick up the show and produce a second season, now titled American Rust: Broken Justice.
Opening Shot: A delivery person brings a box to a house. The person who receives the box walks inside the house, then suddenly, the glass around the door shatters from an explosion.
The Gist: Four months after the West Virginia shootout perpetrated and covered up by Del Harris (Jeff Daniels), the folks in his old stomping grounds of Buell, PA try to get their life back together. Harris, having effectively covered his tracks, is no longer Buell’s police chief; he’s returned to the Pittsburgh PD as a detective, a position he left at least a decade prior.
In the meantime, Grace Poe (Maure Tierney), her estranged husband Virgil (Mark Pellegrino) and their son Billy (Alex Neustaedter) go to a settlement hearing with District Attorney Sue Herlitz (Emily Davis); they’re looking to get restitution for his imprisonment, when he was beaten within an inch of his life while falsely accused of murdering Pete Novick. Grace is insulted by the small pain and suffering settlement Herlitz offers, but is equally shocked when Billy accepts it.
Billy has been doing inpatient rehab for his injuries for the past few months and has decided to stay with his buddy Isaac English (David Alvarez) to keep working on getting his brain to move his arm and leg properly. Isaac has mostly moved on from the Novick incident; he still has the wrench he killed the ex-cop with, which he gives to Billy to dispose of. He’s also come out, looking for men to date on a Grindr-like app. In addition, he and his sister Lee (Julia Mayorga) have fixed up their late dad’s house; when she comes home from her job as a paralegal, her reunion with her ex Billy is warm, albeit a bit uncomfortable.
Harris investigates the package bomb with his partner, Angela Burgos (Luna Lauren Velez), and when he gets back to the station, he’s interrupted during their briefing by Internal Affairs detective Ramon Fisher (Kyle Beltran), who questions him about a shooting that his ex-partner may have been involved with a decade ago. Of course, Harris is incredulous about what he thinks is harassment.
After celebrating Burgos’ birthday, Harris talks to two of his old colleagues, including Vic Walker (Marc Menchaca) and Mike Orr (Nick Sandow); they are in a vigilante side organization called The Brotherhood, and they want to see if Harris is interested in coming back on board. When he expresses interest, they tell him where to find the gun he’ll use to execute his first job.
Grace gets questioned by Steve Park (Rob Yang), who was promoted to chief after Harris left, about Harris’ whereabouts the night of the shootout. There seems to be a discrepancy between what she said happened that night, Harris’ cell phone records, and whom a local bar owner witnessed Harris talking to on his phone that night. As Grace tries to retrieve signed divorce papers from a reluctant Virgil, she sees the bar owner and threatens her to keep her mouth shut. At the same time, Grace wonders just why Harris hasn’t been keeping to his vow to return to the cabin they share on weekends, but Harris’ knows that his attempts to reenter the Brotherhood are for a larger purpose.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? When American Rust premiered two-and-a-half years ago, we said it was a cross between Mare Of Easttown and Your Honor, and we’re sticking with that.
Our Take: Nothing about the American Rust, created by Dan Futterman based on Philipp Meyer’s novel of the same name, has really changed in its second season. If you leave the first season behind and take American Rust: Broken Justice‘s central murder mystery on its own merits, it essentially plays out like a pretty standard police drama, with Harris trying to figure out who is killing people in both Pittsburgh and Buell while trying to root out the people in the Brotherhood for the vigilantes they are. But the implications of the first season are still there, namely in the person of now-chief Park and his attempts to nail his old boss for the shootout.
We already know about Harris’ moral and ethical failings, and in the second season, we see that Grace, Billy and Isaac are in that muck with him; they’re all trying to rebuild their lives despite knowing their particular roles in all the deaths that occurred during the first season.
But here’s what we want to know: Is this season going to be about this new set of murders, with Harris and his new partner Burgos investigating it as if nothing in Buell and over the West Virginia border ever happened? Or will what happened in Season 1 connect with the case in Season 2?
We’re not sure we care what the answer to that question is. Sure, we’d still watch both Daniels and Tierney in just about anything. But it just feels like this story continues to be pretty generic in nature, with a cast of generic characters around the show’s two stars. It also seems that the two of them will be spending less screen time together, at least at the start of the season, which is not what you want when the best part of the first season was the chemistry between its two stars.
Sex and Skin: Isaac has bathroom sex with a seeming stranger at the bar where he meets one of his app connections. But is this person really random?
Parting Shot: A man making a delivery to the bar where Grace threatened the owner finds a body.
Sleeper Star: What role Luna Lauren Velez is going to take on as Harris’ partner Angela Burgos is still to be determined, but when Harris meets with the detective in the Brotherhood, they mention how “by the book” she is. That might be a big hint as to where she fits in this story.
Most Pilot-y Line: Harris wishes Burgos a happy 50th birthday, and she says she’s only 47th. Then he jokingly curses Vic and Mike for telling him the wrong age. Hilarious.
Our Call: SKIP IT. Despite good performances from Daniels and Tierney, American Rust: Broken Justice doesn’t make a case that a second season will be any more of a grim exercise than the first was.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
