Shut Eye (2016)

The show itself teeters between the darkness of this mafioso underworld and the sheer absurdity of it all without fully leaning into either. The result is a tepid con game. It’s fine, but it’s not something you’d anxiously return to each week--which might be why Hulu is dropping all the episodes at once.

If you used to be a “Burn Notice” devotee, and have re-watched every “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul” episode to the point that the episodes have lost their sheen, you may find something enjoy here. That something may be Donovan’s performance. The actor lends a remarkable sensitivity to what could be an entirely odious character.

There’s nothing innovative about this project, but its commitment to fleet storytelling and a game cast take it far.

When Shut Eye focuses on the often separate-but-equal storylines of Linda and Charlie, it’s intriguing; the more it peels off into a tedious storyline about their son’s high school life or the illegal doings of Rossellini’s gangster empire or the strong-arm tactics of the gangster (you’ll wince at a death-by-boiling-oil in a doughnut shop), the more diffuse the series becomes.

Over its next three episodes, Shut Eye, created by Les Bohem (“Extant”), loses most of its momentum as the story grows overcomplicated and undercharacterized. It’s like watching a trick in which the dove fails to fly out of the magician’s hat.

There are a lot of moving parts, some of which work quite well (Mel Harris as a wealthy but naive client who thinks the Haverfords are saving her from a short con when they’re really setting her up for a long one), others of which grind the show to a halt (Dylan Schmid as the inevitable troublemaking teenage son).

The show runs hot and cold, loose and stiff from scene to scene, sometimes pulling back a curtain on a hidden world but just as often running down tracks that nearly two decades worth of TV anti-heroism have worn thin.

We’ll be curious to see what the second half of the season delivers, but its uneven presentation thus far, torn between grounded and outlandish, fails to give a proper platform to its stars (even if they manage to squeeze in moments on their own).

Despite a magnetic performance from its lead actor, it’s not difficult to see Shut Eye’s rather predictable trajectory.