Creator Patrick Radden Keefe’s “Say Nothing: A True Story of Reminiscence and Homicide in Northern Eire” was printed in 2018 and was instantly acclaimed, receiving wonderful critiques, showing on The New York Occasions bestseller record for weeks, and profitable the 2019 Nationwide Guide Critics Circle Award for nonfiction. We’re enormous followers of the e-book: Fellow editor Jacob Corridor and I’ve spoken about it on a pair episodes of our /Movie Day by day podcast, and we raved about the way it advised a propulsive, compelling story whereas additionally offering the mandatory political and social context to grasp the Troubles, a violent interval of instability in Northern Eire that lasted for many years.
Now “Say Nothing” has been tailored right into a collection on FX on Hulu. I’ve seen 5 of the 9 episodes, and I am shocked on the diploma to which this adaptation manages to seize the depth, vitality, and ethical murkiness of the e-book. If you have not heard about this present — which is extraordinarily potential, provided that it did not appear to obtain the identical all-out advertising blitz that one thing like FX’s “Shogun” did earlier this 12 months — I extremely encourage you to test it out, as a result of that is among the greatest TV you will watch in 2024.
FX’s Say Nothing is an immersive exploration of the Troubles
Along with the unbelievable writing, no-nonsense course from gifted up-and-comers, and wonderful performances from its sprawling ensemble forged (Lola Petticrew, Hazel Doupe, Anthony Boyle, and Josh Finan are successfully the leads, however the entire forged is high notch), one of many greatest causes the present succeeds is due to the manufacturing design and costume design. Oftentimes in interval initiatives like this, I get the sense that the filmmakers aren’t capable of transfer the digicam in all places they need as a result of modernity is encroaching onto their units and would pop the phantasm if the shot panned only a couple inches left or proper at a given second. In “Say Nothing,” the alternative is true: The present feels alive, harmful, free, and wholly immersive — virtually such as you’re stepping right into a documentary.
The present whisks us again to the Sixties, ’70s, and presumably past (I have not gotten that far but) and drops us proper into the battle between the Irish Republican Military and the occupying Brits, however sadly, there’s additionally a timelessness to among the concepts being offered right here. Age-old arguments about terrorism versus freedom combating, the oppression of colonizers, and what number of lives you are keen to take to make sure freedom are interrogated in thorny methods that may make you uncomfortable as a viewer. In a media panorama that’s far too steadily content material to easily feed senseless slop to audiences, this can be a present that pokes and prods us in ways in which I discover thrilling.
I spoke slightly about “Say Nothing” on at present’s episode of the /Movie Day by day podcast, which you’ll take heed to under (and in case you’re on the lookout for extra from Patrick Radden Keefe, his addictive podcast “Winds of Change” was one of many issues that received me via 2020):
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