It isn’t often that I’ll call a show an out and out masterpiece, but they do come around every so often. To help you calibrate how I define that term in show currency, Watchmen on HBO was a masterpiece.
Season one of Patriot on Amazon was a masterpiece,
as was season one of Ted Lasso.
Arcane on Netflix is the most recent true masterpiece,
and, while I still haven’t quite managed to overcome the disappointing denouement of that show, most of the first six seasons of Game of Thrones were a masterpiece.
Whether or not those examples help you to hone in on a particular taste manifold or not is immaterial, Wayne, like Patriot, helps you decide in the first five minutes whether or not it’s a show you’d like.
It doesn’t really take that long, to be honest. By the 2:34 mark, you’ll know if you want to give it a chance. If you make it to 7:09 of the pilot, you’ll be hooked. Plain and simple. From there it just keeps blowing your mind, playing against type and getting better and better.
Wayne premiered in 2019 on YouTube Premium as part of their foray into scripted TV. Right out of the gate, it picked up a loyal following, but a second season wasn’t forthcoming once YouTube decided to put all of its original programming on permanent hiatus.
Enter Amazon, which picked up the series and gave it new life by airing it starting in November 2019, and fueling hopeful speculation that a second season might actually be a possibility. To date, that hasn’t materialized, but that shouldn’t dissuade you from absorbing season one like the perfect visual drug that it is.
For people like me, Wayne is exactly what we want. For starters, it has that unique quality rarely seen in Hollywood where the creator of the show actually knows what it means to be poor and the show captures that. Poverty is a character in the show as much as any person, and you can’t miss it. Creator Shawn Simmons threw his heart and soul into this show, capturing the cold and three-deckers and the ubiquitous misery of his hometown of Brockton, Massachusetts with startling accuracy. I live about a half an hour from Brockton, so I may be biased, but when some people think of New England, they think covered bridges and white churches and red barns and snowflakes that fall like gingerbread from the sky, but parts of it are just ass-ugly. Dirty snow, rotting wood and angry people. You can’t swing a dead squirrel where I live without hitting one of the three at any given time.
But what’s it about? Well, it follows the story of — you guessed it — Wayne. He’s a 16-year-old kid who has taken it on the chin from life for as long as he can remember and is desensitized to pain in every form, physical, emotional, you name it. His goals aren’t lofty. He’s just a kid trying to get by in a world that wants to chop him down in a thousand ways.
If you’ve seen Irish actor Mark McKenna before, it would probably have been in the delightful film Sing Street, where he played the role of Eamon.
But Wayne is a departure for McKenna. He crushes this part so hard I can scarcely describe it. His performance is staggering. Not only does he perfectly capture the Boston accent, which is a flowing, liquid thing based on the region you’re from and always overdone by people (including some famous Boston actors) but he manages to personify hope in a hopeless world. Wayne is no different from the “golden child” trope that serves as the backbone for many myths and films and novels and video games, its just that this version of that golden child is dirty and uneducated and cast away by society.
I don’t know if any of you remember Harry Harlow’s monkey experiments used to establish the primacy of the parent-child attachment in the 1950’s but basically he took rhesus monkeys away from their mothers and replaced them with fake mothers. One such facsimile was a comfy, terry cloth mother. The other was made of wire. You can imagine the results, but the character of Wayne feels like one of those poor rhesus monkeys with a wire mother. Emotionally paralyzed and seeing danger everywhere.
If McKenna’s performance was the only great thing about this show, it would be enough, but then we get the other lead, Del, played by Ciara Bravo. I was so blown away by McKenna that I worried no one else would be able to keep pace with him, but Bravo’s Del knocked my socks off. I often say that people are all broken, (yes, you, too) and that great relationships can happen when similarly broken people connect. Vonnegut would call it karass, but mostly it’s just a mutual understanding. A deeper, unconscious inner knowing that says we are the same, somehow.
That’s what Wayne and Del share. Some might say a spiritual connection. It really doesn’t matter because when every day is about basic survival inside of abject poverty and holy shit stupidity, you don’t have time for a lot of navel gazing. Neither of the leads have goals past the series of the day’s meals, and even that can prove to be a challenge.
So what’s the plot of Wayne? Ostensibly — and goddamn I love the gumption of this — it’s that Wayne is on a mission to recover his dad’s stolen 1979 Pontiac Trans Am. Ha! Imagine pitching that concept in a room. My goodness. Bravo, Shawn Simmons.
But really this show is about hope in a hopeless age, love in a loveless time and the desire to genuinely do good in a world that has utterly gone to shit. In that way, Wayne was every bit as prescient and beautiful as Ted Lasso, though you might have to squint to see it.
But the unbelievable acting doesn’t stop there. I can’t say enough about what Stephen Kearin brought to the role of tired-ass cop Sergeant Stephen Geller. This is a role that actors dream of, and he sucked every drop of marrow from that bone.
Ditto for his partner, Officer Jay Ganetti played by James Earl. A smaller role, but note perfect.
Mike O’Malley has been a working actor forever, but in Wayne he flexes acting chops I honestly didn’t know he had as the burnt-out Principal Tom Cole.
There’s also a charming turn from relative newcomer Joshua J. Williams playing Wayne’s schoolmate Orlando Hikes.
We also get rock solid performances from both Dean Winters…
…and Michaela Watkins.
Finally there’s a treat squared in the form of twin brothers Jon and Jamie Champagne, who play the dumber-n-shit Carl and Teddy Luccetti. These characters are soooooo fucking dumb and the Champagne brothers milk the shit out of it. It’s delightful and I couldn’t get enough of it. Dumb done right is a joy to watch, a la Andy Dwyer in Parks & Rec, and these guys never left a joke on the table.
Shot beautifully, great music, an inane plot, a magnificent script and jaw-dropping performances all add up to what amounts to one of the the best shows of the last few years. For me, its a must watch, and I’m not alone. Wayne features a 100% fresh review on Rotten Tomatoes and a 98% audience score. It’s about as great of a show as you can make, and it’s frankly an indictment of the industry that it hasn’t yet been picked up for a second season.
You can watch Wayne at any time by buying it on YouTube or catch it streaming on Amazon.
