To call The Brink a satire of American foreign policy would be incorrect; The Brink isn’t so much satire as it is broad geo-political comedy, one less interested in making valid, real-world observations than painting a picture of international buffoons being idiots. There’s nothing wrong with either show, really: the only requirement for the latter type of show to work is that it be funny, and find its poignancy in its own farcical stories, rather than try to make sharp, subtle points about the US and how we handle ourselves around the world during global crises. This is not Veep, nor is it a funny version of 24 – The Brink lies somewhere beneath the two, and yet, manages to capture neither, all while being an unfunny mess of sex and “cultural jokes”.
Ultimately, that’s what dooms the pilot of The Brink: it’s just not funny at all, and not just because it stars Jack Black, who is (oddly enough), one of America’s more polarizing comedic actors, particularly in the post-King Kong phase of his career. In The Brink, he plays Alex Talbot, a low level Foreign Service officer assigned to the American embassy in Islamabad, which lies on the brink of nuclear war when a mentally unstable radicalist flies off the handle and declares the beginning of World War III. As expected, much of “Pilot” follows around its bumbling star, doing the typical bumbling things Jack Black is known to do; except as Alex Talbot, he does it without any of the manic comedic energy that makes his comedy appealing (when it works). Alex is a flat line character, as mediocre as human beings get – and The Brink seems to neither find him, nor his story, all that compelling.
Instead, The Brink seems to want to focus on Walter Larson (Tim Robbins), a sex-addicted US Secretary of State whose inability to be a decent human being around women doesn’t preclude him from being an effective, nuanced voice of reason at his President’s (Esai Morales) side, despite his openly disgusting behavior throughout the climatic scene, in which director Jay Roach tries to homage Dr. Strangelove, and comes away with an ineffective sequence that mostly features Robbins giving creepy eyes to a young intern translating the words of the manic radicalist. The Brink loves itself some Walter Larson, even more so than Talbot in the pilot: and while Larson is not a unique, complex character in any sense of the word, he’s much more formed and alive than Talbot, whose character kind of feels out of place next to the rest of cast, and the story itself, which centers around Talbot being recruited to steal information from the family of his Pakistani co-worker at the embassy to send to the government.
I haven’t even mentioned the secondary story, where Pornstache Sobotka (okay, it’s just Pablo Schreiber, but his character feels like those two roles oddly shoved together) sells drugs to his military bosses, and accidentally hallucinates while on a video conference with the President of the United States to close the episode. This is the closest The Brink gets to approaching either satire or humor; and it happens in the last ten seconds of the episode, hardly a promising sign for the thirty unfunny minutes that preceded it. That’s really the odd thing about The Brink: it’s clearly trying to be a comedy with light dramatic elements – but none of it is funny. At all; the jokes feel forced, the characterizations thin, and the attempts at actual satire half-hearted, which makes “Pilot” ultimately feel like an incomplete episode of television. Is there a blue print for something more entertaining in The Brink‘s premise? It seems there might be; but if The Brink insists on caging Jack Black, and remains completely committed to telling a story full of dumb people being idiots, it’s not going to survive a long time in the crowded comedic landscape of 2015, even as a weightless summertime diversion.
[Photo via HBO]
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