The first four episodes of Government Cheese are now streaming on Apple TV+. One new episode will debut every Wednesday through May 28.
It’s 1969, and God wants Hampton Chambers (David Oyelowo) to invent a self-sharpening drill. So sayeth the Lord that His loyal follower shall disrupt and innovate the field of handheld machinery—or so Hampton believes, anyway, having found religion while in prison for check fraud. With plot points like this, you can tell that Apple TV+’s new series Government Cheese wants so deeply to be weird. But the show never amounts to more than a bundle of affectations, the equivalent of watching somebody “cut loose” by coming into the office with, like, a slightly louder tie or something.
To get an idea of the tone here, picture a game of telephone that starts at the broader comedies of the Coen brothers – big personalities against a backdrop of screwy Americana, like Raising Arizona or O Brother, Where Art Thou? Somewhere in the middle, already warped and diluted into semi-recognition, is the Coen karaoke of the Fargo TV series. Government Cheese exists at the end of the line, visiting mildly wacky circumstances on a cast of quirky cardboard cutouts.
Hampton, after all, does not get out on parole with only designs on a divine drill; he’s also in hefty debt to the Prevost brothers, a family of French-Canadian gangsters operating out of an orange grove. There are seven of them. He does not tell his wife, Astoria (Simone Missick), who’s already – and quite understandably – peeved at having to raise their teenage sons alone during Hampton’s three-year imprisonment while also pursuing a college degree. Their youngest, Harrison (Jahi Di’Allo Winston), is openly hostile to his father’s return, retreating into an odd fixation on indigenous Chumash culture. The oldest, Einstein (Evan Alexander Ellison), is more genial but also now really into pole vaulting.
To varying degrees, these details are at least a little bit funny, and they play out against a handsome backdrop of pastel colors and manicured suburban lawns (production designer Warren Alan Young has credits on several seasons of Fargo). Every so often, you can even glimpse what the show is going for – each Chambers is striving for fulfillment, whether spiritual or professional (or, in Hampton’s case, both), from the meager hand they’ve been dealt. Hence the title: “government cheese,” in reference to the processed food given to impoverished people so they can make something from what is functionally nothing.
But those glimpses are as good as it gets with this series, which has only a tenuous grasp of the characters beyond their surface-level quirks. For a story built on Hampton’s homecoming and his determination to walk the righteous path, there’s precious little insight into what the Chambers household was like before or during his incarceration. We don’t get a sense of shared history between the family, don’t feel the lives they’ve lived. It’s not in the acting, not in the otherwise striking set design, and certainly not in the writing, which has everyone declaring their feelings and aspirations to the various sounding boards meant to pass for supporting characters.
In one episode, Hampton has a heart-to-heart with a strange woman (Sunita Mani) stuck in a vent. She’s implied to be some kind of ethereal messenger, mysteriously vanishing once Hampton looks away. But she’s really no different from the other, more earthbound characters, because their own existences all seem to begin and end at what they can do for Hampton. His childhood friend and known associate Bootsy (Bokeem Woodbine, who you might also recognize from a season of Fargo) simply hands him a car, hoping to lure him back to a life of crime but otherwise with no strings attached. The youngest Prevost brother, Jean-Guy (Louis Cancelmi), offers to cancel Hampton’s debt in exchange for the self-sharpening drill, and then exits the whole middle of the series while Hampton thinks on it.
What really spoils Government Cheese, though, is just how safe it manages to be in its reheated imitation. Here is a show for anyone who ever wished that the Coens would tone down their abrasive weirdos, or that Wes Anderson would chill out with the fussy aesthetics. Hampton doesn’t react with anger or disbelief toward his family’s chilly reception of him – Oyelowo is given no material that might endanger our sympathy for him. Even when he’s more openly conniving, he operates exclusively at a low, dull hum of protagonist likability. Harrison needles him about all the “Yahweh stuff” (which Hampton prefers to the more formal title of “God”), but his newfound faith rarely comes up. Here’s a guy who thinks God has given him a mission, yet he goes for long stretches without talking about it at all. He doesn’t proselytize, doesn’t yammer on about Yahweh’s plan, doesn’t even corral his kids into going to church.
For a little while, I wondered if this was intentional, an expression of how flimsy and self-serving Hampton’s faith is. But the handful of seemingly divine occurrences in Government Cheese simply demonstrate its lack of imagination, grounding any flights of fancy by tagging them with a plausible explanation. No strange happenings may simply exist as an expression of character and circumstance. The Lord has to be giving Hampton a sign, and the vent lady has to be some ethereal messenger setting him straight. If Government Cheese won’t take a chance on making us disapprove of Hampton’s actions, why would it ask us to suspend our disbelief about his situation, too?
