When law professor Tal (Grantham Coleman) enters his childhood home ahead of his father’s funeral, his young son Bentley (Dyllan Yelverton) turns to him with curiosity. “Is Grandpa going to be a ghost?” he asks. No, Tal responds. “So he won’t haunt us?” Tal patiently replies that he doesn’t think so.
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As it turns out, Tal will be right on the first count and wrong on the second. MGM+’s Emperor of Ocean Park is not the sort of story in which spirits return to wreak supernatural havoc. It is, however, entirely about the ways in which Tal and his siblings are haunted by the memory of their dad, conservative judge Oliver Garland (Forest Whitaker), in ways that lend themselves to both Grishamesque thrills and Succession -lite angst. But even Whitaker’s innate gravitas can only do so much to fight gravity. Eventually, the drama sags under the weight of its messy ambition.
There is one last question Bentley has for Tal: “Was he a good daddy?” This one, Tal does not answer. The Oliver Garland the world knew was a judge once hailed on magazine covers as the future of American conservatism, before a late-in-life turn toward cable news conspiracy theories. The view that Tal, his journalist-turned-housewife sister Mariah (Tiffany Mack) and their newscaster brother Addison (Henry Simmons) have of him initially does not appear to be much closer. They refer to him not as “Dad” but as “the judge,” deflect the question of what to put on his tombstone and reminisce about the many stern lectures he used to give them on the principles of “honor, duty, justice.”
Almost as soon as Oliver has gone, though, their ideas of him are thrown into question. At the funeral, Tal is cornered by Jack Ziegler (Torrey Hanson), the ex-CIA war criminal whose controversial friendship tanked Oliver’s Supreme Court dreams. He needs Tal to hand over “the arrangements” — the first of roughly 8,000 times we’ll hear this phrase — and clueless as Tal is to what they even are, he soon realizes that Jack is only one of several parties desperate enough to kill for them. With his own life on the line and his family under threat, Tal is forced to piece together the bread crumbs Oliver left behind toward the darkest secrets he kept hidden from his children.
For a while, Emperor of Ocean Park skates by on the momentum of that mystery. Tal might be reluctant to begin looking, but Mariah is eager from the start to prove that Oliver’s death was no ordinary heart attack — and willing to throw in as much of her husband’s money or Pulitzer-winning investigative skills as she needs to prove it.
Within days, the siblings find themselves in a tangled web of clues, red herrings and self-consciously heavy-handed chess metaphors. Every time their trail threatens to grow cold, creator Sherman Payne ( Shameless , Charm City Kings ) tosses in another big twist to reshuffle the board. In the first three episodes alone, another man is murdered, a strange clue materializes in Tal’s classroom and a car explodes right in front of his face.
Meanwhile, each installment flashes back to other significant chapters in the Garland family saga, gradually piecing together an explanation of what these “arrangements” are and why they were made. Along the way, they also delve into the clan’s most formative wounds (like the night Tal’s kid sister Abby, played by Avery Holliday, was killed in a hit-and-run), or the moments that crystallized their relationships (like the time an adolescent Tal lost a chess match, and got a scolding from Oliver about the importance of Black men like themselves learning to beat cheating white folks at their own games).
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Adapted from the novel by Stephen L. Carter, Emperor of Ocean Park is too scattered to serve as either in-depth character study or searing social commentary. But it has a feel for the down-to-earth dynamics of family. It’s never more alive than in scenes like Mariah and Addison ribbing Tal’s terrible outfit, or Abby joking to Oliver that her liberal leanings are “karmic justice” for his own Republican ones.
The series struggles from the start to balance its potboiler thrills with family drama, however, and by the second half is getting lost in its own weeds. At ten hours, the season feels simultaneously overstuffed and overlong.
Subplots about Tal’s teaching career or his suspicion of his wife’s infidelity fail to justify the inordinate amount of time they take up, given that Kimmer (Paulina Lule) barely registers as a character and Tal doesn’t seem to care much about her or his job in the first place. And while the flashbacks get more propulsive as they get more Oliver-centric in the final chapters, they also stall character development for everyone else. The explanation of what Oliver did and why might be complete by the end, but our impressions of Mariah or Addison or their mother Claire (Ora Jones) are left as incomplete sketches.
Meanwhile, the main conspiracy sprawls out in so many directions that it becomes confusing to keep track of which questions have been resolved, which ones we’re still pursuing and which ones have quietly been dropped because they’re no longer relevant.
There are times when one suspects characters continue to withhold crucial information from one another solely because the series has an episode count to fill; I lost track of how many times Tal was told “It’s not what it looks like” or “I’m trying to protect you.” It’s no wonder that after a while, he gets tired of waiting for answers and just starts throwing punches at the people he suspects of hiding things from him. The poor guy is in over his head. His show is too.
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