An immigrant drama that gets the job done.
Thony (Elodie Yung) needs to save her son’s life.
Now she works off the books cleaning hotels, night clubs, and underground female MMA brawls.
Michael Desmond/FOX
Her son also needs a new liver.
And did you know Thony is a brilliant doctor?
The pilot starts with an improvised tracheotomy.
By the end, there’s an actual explosion.
The undocumented setting provides an unexpected power, or maybe just a wider array of thrills.
Everything is more tense than it should be.
And Fionastillconsiders selling ecstasy as a side hustle.
Yung previously played Elektra in the Marvel-Netflix universe, and she was dragged to hell inGods of Egypt.
She’s stalwart here and a tad stiff, but she nails a three-jobs quality of tough exhaustion.
“What are you,” responds a baffled criminal, “some kind of doctor or something?”
Oh man, wait’ll you find out what show you’re in!
The aforementioned cute gangster is Arman.
His Mexican parents left their country to avoid gang violence.
So he’s another immigrant doing whatever he can.
“You and I are both in a country that is not our own,” he says.
(His mother was a housekeeper, which gives his fixation on Thony a special Freudian whiff.)
I’m making this sound heavy, so I’m failing miserably.
The ever-splendid Navid Negahban plays Arman’s boss Hayak, an ice-cold killer plotting his own casino-buying American dream.
Yes, and not always in the good way.
Sin City trash whiplashes with mawkish cute-kid sensitivity.
Thony’s son Luca (Sebastien and Valentino LaSalle) mainly exists to make parents cry once an episode.
There is a subplot about a DACA system (the lawyer costs a fortune).
Arman’s entanglement with Hayak’s family revs up the underworld succession counter-plotting.
Episode 5 delves into the horrors of an immigrant detention center.
Millan makes Fiona the wild melodrama’s lone real person, struggling through tough circumstances with unfussy desperation.
The show could follow Fiona’s lead and deepen its portrait of the everyday trials of undocumented paranoia.
I’m rooting for it.
Frankly, I never expected to see anything like this in my lifetime.
It’s also how you make a melting pot.
Grade: B
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