Vague Visages’ Parish season 1 review contains minor spoilers. Sunu Gonera’s AMC series features Giancarlo Esposito, Zackary Momoh and Paula Malcomson. Check out the VV home page for more TV reviews, along with cast/character summaries, streaming guides and complete soundtrack song listings.

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AMC’s Parish is the kind of show that, back in the day, would’ve begun its life as one those paperback original pulp novels stocked in spinner racks. It traffics in cliches, which are called tropes when they’re well-done. Based on the English series The Driver (2014) — which has a similar setup but different details — Parish stars Giancarlo Esposito as an uncharacteristically quiet and reactive (for him) hero, one of those older guys who swears he’s left the criminal life but has to dive back into it because he owes various types of debts, can’t say no to an old friend, has a code of honor, etc. Not only is he a graying badass, his name is actually Gray. Gracián “Gray” Parish, to be precise.

Gray owns a limo service and lives with his wife, Ros (Paula Malcomson), and their daughter, Makayla (Arica Himmel), in a nice old house. The couple had another child, a son named Maddox (Caleb Baumann). He was killed in a still-unsolved shooting almost exactly one year before the start of this story. There’s a scene where the surviving Parishes commemorate Maddox’s passing around the family dinner table, an example of trying to ritualize the observance of a tragedy that accomplishes nothing except making everyone feel awkward and false — including Gray, though he’d never admit it.

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Gray’s old partner, an ex-con named Colin (Skeet Ulrich), shows up beaten to heck and asking for a favor for old time’s sake: put his past-life skills as a wheel man to use one more time, in service of an Zimbabwean immigrant crime family, the Tongais. It’s a heist, and of course things don’t go as planned, putting the hero in a Walter White-Jesse Pinkman sort of predicament (you’ll know what I mean when you get to the sequence). Gray rallies with iceberg cool, improvising his way out of jeopardy. He does such a good job that the Tongais keep trying to put him on permanent retainer. Gray resists but ultimately gets pulled into their inner circle, the last place he wants to be.

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There isn’t all that much action in Parish. The pilot starts with a fragment of a car chase that plays out in full near the end. But it’s mostly talk and characterization. That’s fine when Gray is doing specific crime-thriller things on the ground, or when the show is focusing on him and his wife and/or daughter (the family relationships sound a bit too scripted, but the actors make you believe that these are all flesh-and-blood individuals).

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But Parish loses steam when it’s breaking away from the main family to observe the sibling dynamics of the Tongais. They’re too video-gamey. There are three grown siblings, the standard King Lear configuration. The current family leader is The Horse (Zackary Momoh), who seems to have modeled his vibe on Al Pacino in 1974’s The Godfather Part II (he loves his son and rarely loses his cool — but when he does, watch out). The Horse has a sister named Shamiso (Bonnie Mbuli); viewers never get a handle on what her deal is, except that she’s always low-key and sometimes high-key mad that people don’t want to do things her way. There’s another brother named Zenzo (Ivan Mbakop) who’s like every other secondary gangster you’ve seen in a film or on TV: he preens, he pontificates, he shouts and threatens, he’s a bombastic jerk, he’s pathetic when you stand back from him and you know you won’t miss him when he’s gone.

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Esposito carries the show in Parish, playing Gray as a version of a classic Elmore Leonard hero who is too old for youthful shenanigans but whose wisdom and unflappability give him the edge he needs to survive. He makes Gray seem like a real person rather than a theoretical construct, and proves he’s just as solid a straight man (opposite Ulrich’s manipulative, needy once-and-future partner) as he is playing the volatile eccentrics who defined the early years of his career.

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At six episodes, Parish isn’t quite satisfying. It’s hard to say if it’s too long or not long enough. Maybe it’s the muggy American gothic New Orleans locations that made me err on the side of wishing it were longer. The off-brand elements are so raggedy and intriguing that it made me wonder what would have happened if the writers and filmmakers and actors had been empowered to see how long they could stretch scenes and moments without alienating a mass audience.

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There’s a methodical action sequence set in a cemetery that runs maybe two-thirds the length of the episode that features it. Through most of it, characters are hiding behind crypts and tombstones to avoid being seen. The sequence literalizes the predicament of the Parish family, who are trapped in the cemetery and can’t get out. The show opens with a second line, or jazz funeral; the reality and threat of death are infused into every moment, even when nobody’s packing heat. Parish pays such close attention to the fine points of the family’s emotional damage and recovery that there are times when the crime elements feel as if they’re impeding on a domestic drama about coping with the unthinkable. The son’s death bobs up into the foreground again later, in a way that cheapens it, which is a shame. In all, what’s onscreen feels like a dry run for something deeper and better, hopefully in season 2.

Matt Zoller Seitz (@mattzollerseitz) is a staff writer for New York Magazine and Vulture, the editor-at-large of RogerEbert.com and the author or co-author of a dozen bestselling books on film and television, including The Wes Anderson Collection, Mad Men Carousel and The Sopranos Sessions.

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