Harlan Coben's Shelter: Stranger Things Meets Hunters

Stranger Things meets Hunters: that's what came to mind after seeing the first three episodes of Harlan Coben's Shelter (that's its name) on Amazon Prime Video back on August 18th, and I felt the same after seeing the finale eighth episode of what I hope will be just first season last night.  By which I mean: the center of the story are a bunch of idiosyncratic highly intelligent high school kids (Stranger Things) but the larger picture is not some Duffer Bros horror story, but a group of all-too human slave traders descended in some way from the Nazis (Hunters).

Stranger Things starred mostly unknown or little known performers with the exception of Winona Ryder, Hunters was pretty much the same except it had the mega-star Al Pacino, and Harlan Corbin's Shelter was more like Stranger Things, with Tovah Feldshuh the biggest star.  My wife and I first saw her on Broadway in Yentl years ago, and it's always good to see her again.  The rest of the acting in Shelter was pretty good, too, with standout acting by Jaden Michael as Mickey, the hero of this otherwise ensemble story.

I'm not going to say anything specific about the plot, because there are narrative-upending developments in just about every episode.  But I will say that you won't be sure or likely right about any of the villains until close to the end, and not every character you've come to know survives, and the ending will make you unsure about even that.  I'll also say that just as Stranger Things exults in the 1980s, Shelter is very much in the present, with even a political awareness displayed by some of the characters, and that's very much Harlan Coben and very much welcome.

I'll also say that I wish all eight episodes had been put up all at once, as Amazon and Netflix used to do it. That's what created binging, which turned the TV series into a novel, where you could enjoy as many chapters as you wanted in one continuing experience, but that's become an increasingly endangered species, as the streamers want to maximize their continuing subscribers.

But now that all eight episodes of Harlan Coben's Shelter are up there, you can binge them in this our degraded media environment, which I highly recommend.

And I hope to see you back here when I review the second season, which I intend to do it there is one.

Hunters Season 2: Alternate History Hitler

I just binged the eight-episode second and final season of Hunters on Amazon Prime Video.  I liked it a lot more than the first season, and I liked the first season a lot, with some reservations.  Indeed, though the first season was an intensely personal story set in all-too real world, the second season was even more personal and managed also to be about the real world, our current real world, in fact.

[Spoilers ahead ... ]

The first season ends with the revelation that Hitler and Eva Braun are alive and well and planning to take over the world from their secret compound in Argentina.  That revelation comes after the upending unmasking of Nazi-hunter Meyer Offerman (Al Pacino) as the German concentration monster Wilhelm Zuchs aka The Wolf.   The second season picks up the backstory of Offerman/Zucks but shows its mettle in the Hitler/Braun story, and how our band of Hunters finally brings them to justice.

It does such a good job of this, on so many levels, that I'd say it lifts Hunters into The Man in the High Castle TV series territory, and lands just slightly behind it. The relationship between Hitler and Braun -- their mutual contempt, with Braun thinking she's the logical leader of the Fourth Reich and Hitler telling her at some point that the most important accomplishment of her life will be that she married him -- is both surprising and convincing.  The battles of the Hunters and Nazis are exciting and unpredictable.

But the biggest strength of the second season, right up there with its achievement as alternate history, is the way it links its 1979 story by strong implication to the resurgence of Naziism and white supremacy that grips our country and our world today.  The January 6, 2021 attack on Congress, the shootings of New Mexico Democrats by a Republican who lost the 2022 election, reported just in the past few days, show how looming and dangerous fascism is in the United States right now.  Putin says his savage attacks on Ukraine are to root out Nazis but he and his military are the ones employing Nazi tactics in their atrocities and propaganda.  In the very last scene of Hunters, Jonah looks across a table at an outdoor cafe at someone who looks like Hitler.  We last saw Hitler locked up in a high security prison in Europe, so there's no reason to think the man at that table was Hitler.  But there's every reason to think that the imprisonment of the real Hitler has not put much of a dent in the would-be Hitlers at large in 1979 -- and even more so today.

If I had one quibble with this powerful story, it is that too many of the characters on both sides seem to be able to easily survive being hit and even riddled by bullets.  I could accept this happening once.  But even twice is too much, in terms of stretching credibility.

But there were also some masterpieces of scenes and episodes in this second season.  I thought the seventh episode, nearly a standalone story of a German couple who give shelter to several families of Jewish people, could easily have been an Oscar-winning movie in itself.  And the battle scenes throughout the narrative were as good as they get.

Inevitably, the question arises of how about another season?  I thought Amazon cancelled The Man in the High Castle a little too quickly after four seasons, and that's certainly the case for Hunters after two seasons and the crucial story it's been telling.  Given the precarious condition of the world in which we now live, I have a feeling we'll be seeing a continuation of the Hunters story in some format and venue before too long.

See also Hunters: Praise and Reservations

my interview of Rufus Sewell about The Man in the High Castle

poems about the Holocaust ... my review

my interview with Grzegorz Kwiatkowski

an alternate history short story -- get it on Kindle, or read it free on Vocal

The Plot Against America 1.1: Yet Another Alternate Nazi History, with Forshpeis

I find myself in the less than jubilant position of reviewing the third television science fiction series about Nazis - science fiction, loosely defined - in the past three days.  The first would be Hunters (my review here), the second Westworld (more, precisely it's season three coda; my review here), and now The Plot to Against America on HBO.  I'll leave it to you to explain why Nazis are so popular on American television these days.

The Plot hinges on Charles Lindbergh, who in real history was a non-interventionist and likely Nazi sympathizer in the 1930s, bur did fight against the Nazis and Japanese in the Second World War. In the television series, he beats FDR in the Presidential election of 1940, and (though I haven't read the 2004 novel by Philip Roth or seen more than the first episode of the series) presides over an America in which anti-semitism is rampant.

Philip Roth and Philip K. Dick are two very different kinds of brilliant writers, so don't expect any Man in the High Castle (in my view, probably the best science fiction series ever on television) in The Plot Against America alternate history.  Instead, think about Roth's other notable works, like Goodbye Columbus, which focus on the pleasures and problems of Jewish life in mid-20th-century New Jersey.  You'll find lots of that in the first episode of The Plot Against America, which introduces the extended Levin family, its struggle to move up in the middle class and fend off the rising Nazi tide. 

The details in 1940 Newark are spot on, ranging from the Esso gas station to the clothing to the Yiddish sprinkled in the conversations.  This has to be the first time I've heard the word forshpeis in an American TV drama.  It brings back wonderful memories of both my grandmother's voice and her forshpeis.   

The acting in The Plot Against America is top-drawer, too, with Winona Ryder, John Turturro, and David Krumholtz in important roles, eating rolls that made me hungry, and I'll be back here next week with a review of the second episode.

 

Hunters: Praise and Reservations

Hunters, due to its unusual mix of things I really liked and aspects I found annoying, is one of the strangest television series I've ever seen.   For that reason alone, it's unique,

What I really liked was of course Al Pacino's superb acting in the lead role in late 1970s America.  The rest of the acting was excellent, too, including Logan Lerman as Jonah.  The concentration camp scenes in 1940s Nazi Europe were of course not likeable, but as powerful as ever I've seen in a television series or a movie.  The depth of the Fourth Reich hatred of Jews in late 1970s America was well portrayed, which is to say, chilling and sobering to the core, even though it's not completely clear how much exaggeration, if any, is in that portrayal.

The series is billed as based on true events.  It is true that America welcomed Wernher von Braun and other Nazi scientists to the U. S. after the war, rather than see them fall into the hands of the Soviets.  It's also true that von Braun's genius in rocketry was at partly responsible for the U. S. beating the Soviets in the space race, and getting us to the Moon and back in 1969.  What's not clear at all in our history is whether von Braun had any connection to American neo-Nazis, and, indeed, to indicate that he did, as in Hunters, moves his true story into rank conspiracy theory.

And that gets to the parts I really didn't care for in Hunters.  In addition to playing fast and loose with life and death matters, Hunters deliberately almost frolics at times in a cartoonish ambience.  Faux commercials either promoting the Fourth Reich or telling the truth about some political matter are peppered into the episodes.  Although the action scenes are excellent, there's a bit of too much derring do and wise-cracking among the combatants.  The story works best when it tenderly presents the foibles of vulnerable human life, and worst when it verges into super heroism.

The plot is complex and, for the most part, very effective.  I'll leave it to you to decide if you liked the stunning revelation in last episode.  I didn't, particularly, and also think it didn't quite make sense.

Nonetheless, I'd rate Hunters as well worth your seeing.



just releasing:  Welcome Up: Songs of Space and Time  - digital, CD, vinyl