"The Good Lord Bird" TV Review
- Ken Ilgunas
- Oct 8, 2020
- 1 min read
Updated: Dec 14, 2021
I give the first episode of Showtime's The Good Lord Bird a C+.
I've been patiently waiting for fifteen years for a John Brown show/movie, and finally Showtime is featuring the adaptation of a James McBride book.
You can tell Ethan Hawke has fun with the full-throated Jeremiads (and what actor wouldn't?), but they're used too often when they could have been used to greater effect if used sparingly (think Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction). Hawke is one of my favorite actors, but he's too young to play Brown. Physical comedy is not Hawke's strong suit, and everything about the depiction feels excessive. I would have preferred a younger Robert Duvall.
I can handle a little teasing of John Brown, but he's almost completely depicted as incompetent, foolish, zealous, or insane. For his first depiction on the screen, I would have liked to see a bit of nuanced reverence. The book Cloudsplitter (which I highly recommend) did better to capture Brown's moral ferocity and amusing radicality. Same with Tony Horwitz's Midnight Rising (also excellent).
Overall, the acting is largely poor; the action is choppy, unrealistic, and forgettable; and the script feels oddly rushed, even though they had plenty of space to tell the story. I don't have much hope for the rest of the series. What a waste.
The Ethan Hawke age point surprised me, but once you said it I couldn’t unsee it — the performance is loud, but not “worn-in.” I wonder if a more weathered casting choice would’ve let them play Brown straighter without losing humor; maybe it’s like trying a new look on StyleLookLab and realizing the fit is the real issue, not the color.
I didn’t mind a little stylization, but the “excessive” physical comedy note nails what bothered me — it’s like the tone is winking at you the whole time. I kept thinking the show wanted a quirky aesthetic more than a scary, grounded one, kind of the same impulse that drives those ghibli ai portraits where everything turns charming even when the source isn’t.
The “first screen depiction” point is what I keep coming back to — if this is someone’s first exposure to John Brown, the show basically turns him into a cartoon. I’m curious if later episodes ever let him be frighteningly competent, because right now it feels like they’re afraid of sincerity; weirdly it reminds me of how platforms like hrefgo can make everything look the same when you strip away the context and edges.
I haven’t read McBride’s book yet, but your comparison to Cloudsplitter makes me think the adaptation went for “energy” over moral weight. Also, your note about the pacing feeling rushed even with a full episode is dead on — I watched it at 1.25x and still felt like scenes were missing; I used a playback speed calculator afterward just to see how much time I’d actually saved, and it wasn’t worth the whiplash.
The part that stuck with me is your point about Brown being played almost entirely as incompetent/insane — it’s hard to care about the stakes when the show won’t take its own subject seriously. I bailed early too and wound up zoning out with stuff like that blockblast game online afterward, which says a lot about how little the episode pulled me back in.