We’ve talked on a number of occasions about how so many streaming series go overboard with the time line jumps, to the point of distraction. It often feels as if we’re hopping forward and backward and forward again and back again without legitimate dramatic justification.
In an early episode of the overwrought and disappointing MGM+ limited series “Emperor of Ocean Park,” this technique is taken to perhaps unprecedented extremes. It starts in 2007 and then makes all these time jumps from scene to scene in just this one episode:
Present Day ... 2007 ... Present Day ... 2007 ... Present Day ... 2009 ... Present Day ... 2009 ... Present Day ... 2009 ... Present Day ... 2009 ... Present Day ... 2009 ... Present Day.
One of the scenes that is set in the year 2009 lasts for all of 20 seconds and features exactly two lines of dialogue. Crazy.
That I was compelled to keep such a record tells you how much the gimmick took me out of the story. Granted, in later episodes, the material is given room to breathe, but even if “Emperor of Ocean Park” had been told in mostly linear fashion, this adaptation of Stephen L. Carter’s 2002 blockbuster novel of the same name most likely wouldn’t have been able to overcome its soap-sudsy tone, the thinly sketched and clichéd characters and the plausibility-stretching plot developments.
With a foundation that includes grown siblings fighting for the approval of their powerful and highly critical father even after he has passed away, the adaptation of “Emperor of Ocean Park” has some basic similarities to “Succession,” but it plays more like a mid-level network TV series than awards-bait prestige streaming material.
Even the mighty talents of Forest Whitaker can’t elevate “Emperor of Ocean Park,” though Whitaker delivers a compelling performance as the mercurial Judge Oliver Garland, who seems a lock for the Supreme Court, but has to withdraw when it is revealed that Oliver has maintained close ties to his college roommate, a shady government operative turned war criminal named Jack Ziegler (Torrey Hanson, a wonderful actor who is unfortunately not nearly as menacing as this character should be).
In Oliver’s later years, he struggles with alcoholism and becomes a right-wing conservative talking head who regularly appears on Fox News, and has difficult relationships with his three grown children: Addison (Henry Simmons), a serial bachelor; Mariah (Tiffany Mack). a former investigative journalist who married into serious money, and Talcott, known as “Tal” (Grantham Coleman), a professor at the University of Chicago who suspects his ambitious wife Kimmer (Paulina Lule) is having an affair. (The “Ocean Park” of the title is a wealthy enclave in Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard, and the Garland family does have a house there, but the series was filmed in the Chicago area, with the bulk of the scenes set here as well.)
After Oliver is found dead in his home, Tal learns his father has put him in charge of handling “The Arrangements,” but he has no idea what that means. (It has nothing to do with Oliver’s funeral.) A cryptic note containing the phrase “Excelsior! Excelsior!” only heightens the mystery, with the conspiracy-minded Mariah convinced their father was murdered. This sets off a wild and wide-ranging series of events, as the plot expands to include a murdered pastor, two different people who are following Tal, various shootouts, car chases, an explosion and all sorts of domestic melodrama.
As “Emperor of Ocean Park” plods through 10 long episodes, the tone shifts from a study of identity politics to a murder mystery to a political thriller to a full-blown conspiracy story. Key scenes are often rendered in maddeningly frustrating fashion, as when one sibling finally reveals a huge secret to the other two, and the exchange is stretched out as if we’re watching a daytime soap opera.
The more we know about Judge Garland, the more he seems like a pathological narcissist who even in death is manipulating his grown children for no greater purpose. Meanwhile, the hapless Tal keeps making bad decisions and gets into all sorts of violent scrapes, while older brother Addison disappears from the story for great stretches of time, and Mariah is so busy being acerbic and playing detective she neglects her family.
Even more problematic — none of them is particularly interesting or multi-dimensional.
It’s likely you’ll figure out what “The Arrangements” are long before the series finally makes that reveal, and even more likely you won’t care all that much by then.
