Going as far back as last summer when the first ominous countdown clock teaser debuted, every single time I see footage of Oppenheimer, it has made me want to rewatch the overlooked two-season historical drama Manhattan. And what better way to prepare for Christopher Nolan’s highly anticipated summer blockbuster than with a canceled-too-soon TV series packed with actors who have since become recognizable favorites?
Sam Shaw’s Manhattan debuted in 2014 on WGN America, when the quintessential antihero who was a complex period character was the hottest trend in TV. It didn’t matter if they were based on real people or entirely fictitious, as long as they were complicated. Think “I can fix him,” before that phrase entered the popular lexicon.
Mad Men was heading toward its conclusion, and every network was looking for the next Don Draper. In 2013, The Americans hid a marriage story inside a spy narrative, utilizing the last decade of the Cold War as a backdrop for different interpretations of loyalty and patriotism. Halt and Catch Fire premiered the month before Manhattan, adding to this trend with its exploration of the rise of computers in the 1980s and the prickly geniuses who were making waves.
The TV landscape has fundamentally changed in the nine years since that summer. Anyone would be hard-pressed to remember what other original dramas aired on the now-defunct WGN network (Underground, Salem, and Outsiders). In fact, I misremembered that Manhattan had aired on AMC, thanks to it fitting the brand and because it can now be found on AMC+ (along with Hoopla, Tubi, and Freevee). That’s not to mention that WGN America is a name I haven’t heard in years.
Even in 2014, Kevin Fallon wrote in his glowing Manhattan review for The Daily Beast that “most TV consumers have no idea what the hell WGN America is.” This was spot-on, considering it was canceled after its second season. (Nine years later, another prophecy from Fallon in the same review has come to pass: “It raises the question of whether there really just may be too much television these days.”)
In 2021, casting news announcing that Cillian Murphy would switch his Peaky Blinders newsboy cap for a J. Robert Oppenheimer’s porkpie hat in Nolan’s latest project was the catalyst that led to me finally catching up with the hidden gem. That same October, I binged both seasons (totaling 23 episodes) in under a week, something I recently repeated in lieu of going outside over the holiday weekend. It had completely slipped my mind that the Manhattan pilot opens on July 2, 1943, and includes an Independence Day celebration at the top-secret location in the middle of the New Mexico desert. Insert the ‘Leo pointing’ meme here to reflect my lack of chill when I saw the date and realized the coincidence.
So what is Manhattan, and why should you check it out?
Spoiler alert: light spoilers for Manhattan and some historical spoilers for Oppenheimer follow.
A radio report playing over the opening scene paints a bleak picture of the casualty list “on the eve of another Independence Day,” an onscreen graphic states that 61 countries are at war, there are more than 40 million casualties, and it is 766 days before Hiroshima. A yet unnamed figure plays golf using his car's headlamps as his only light source in the dusty, dark setting before having a eureka moment. Soon, we learn that WWI veteran Dr. Frank Winter (John Benjamin Hickey) is a brilliant physicist who doesn’t play by the rules and ruffles all the wrong feathers within this government facility. While this archetype is overplayed, Frank’s journey takes unexpected deviations in exploring the ethics of a weapon with the power to vaporize cities—and Hickey delivers a deeply nuanced performance.
Frank leads one team of scientists within the top-secret Manhattan Project, tasked with developing an atomic bomb. Los Alamos, New Mexico, was originally home to a ranch school and was subsequently acquired by the military. A town was erected in its place to accommodate these experts, their families, and the men in uniform sent to keep a watchful eye over proceedings—and to ensure no secrets ended up in the hands of Nazis or the Soviets. In 1943, Los Alamos opened its doors to what was originally meant to be a small community, but two years later, its population hit 4,000 civilians and 2,000 servicemen.
It doesn’t take a scientific genius to realize that an isolated town focused on the war effort with an average age of 25 years old (as per American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, which is the inspiration for Nolan’s movie) is the ideal backdrop for a big-budget movie or a TV show. Manhattan’s heady mix of politically charged storylines, subterfuge, and relationships crumbling under the stress of this isolated environment makes it a community worth exploring.
“This is not going to be a Great Men of History piece,” creator Shaw said at the Manhattan TCA panel in 2014. Whereas Nolan’s forthcoming movie places the father of the atomic bomb front and center, Robert Oppenheimer (Daniel London) only appears in a third of the episodes and is rarely at the heart of the events. Instead, the majority of the characters are fictitious, allowing Shaw greater scope for dialing up the drama while also exploring the scientific methodology and ethical debates that go hand-in-hand with research that can destroy the world. (Figures who worked on the project and even tried to oppose it do provide inspiration for the likes of Frank.)
Two bombs were designed in New Mexico, and Shaw’s series pits the two teams against each other in the race to make a successful weapon. Maverick Frank heads the rag-tag “implosion” team, relegated to a rustic hut, whereas hotshot young scientist Charlie Isaacs (Ashley Zukerman) immediately gains entry to the main building. Charlie has been selected as an integral part of the “Thin Man” group and is working on a gun model mechanism. Don’t worry; you don’t need a degree in quantum physics to understand the series, although it also doesn’t overly dumb down the science—much like how shows like ER use medical jargon while still effectively conveying what is unfolding.
Frank is unimpressed by Charlie’s genius, and this bristling dynamic is an ongoing push-and-pull threading through the two seasons. Zuckerman is most recognizable as Succession’s Nate, and here he gets to play the shades of gray of a man tasked with creating a weapon of mass destruction.
While Los Alamos did have similar amenities as a typical town in the 1940s and encouraged social activities, workers were forbidden from discussing the details of their “day at the office” with their spouses. Therefore, without small talk about work as an option, sex became an easy way to bridge the lack of communication. What followed was the need for a robust maternity ward as the number of babies born at this location was 80 in the first year alone and 10 per month after that—any person born here has PO Box 1663 as their birthplace. Manhattan acknowledges this trend and the horniness of its scientists and wives. Wandering eyes are also part of this environment, with Charlie and his wife, Abby (Rachel Brosnahan), straying when other conversation fails.
The message here is that scientists fuck, which Nolan’s movie also endorses (The Guardian first reported that the film includes “prolonged nudity”).
Oppenheimer’s messy romantic entanglements have been teased as part of the press tour (though Murphy mentioned a NDA prohibiting the cast from detailing overall specifics of the film, and honestly, I’m all for the surprise). In Manhattan, Robert’s relationship with former fiancée Jean Tatlock propels Brosnahan’s nosy switchboard operator’s story forward in the second season. It also speaks to a wider conspiracy theory that has never been resolved—which I won’t get into here because of spoilers, but feel free to look it up. Suffice it to say Manhattan leans into the most sensationalist take on this story.
From the trailer, Oppenheimer appears to have a “getting the gang together” tone, whereas the TV series throws us into the story after Los Alamos has been constructed. Aside from the obvious similarities when using the same historical event, these two titles boast a cast of actors you instantly recognize from a slew of other projects. Manhattan is a character actor paradise, boasting the aforementioned Hickey, Zukerman, and Brosnahan, as well as other TV faves like Olivia Williams, David Harbour, Harry Lloyd (aka Tom Hiddleston’s clone), a pre-Evil Katja Herbers, the always delightful Michael Chernus, The West Wing’s Richard Schiff and William Petersen.
This list barely scratches the surface, and you should be on the lookout for guest stars Griffin Dunne, Mamie Gummer, Justin Kirk, Jason Ralph (Brosnahan’s now-husband), and the never-misses Bill Camp. Christopher Denham has the honor of playing a series regular in Manhattan and a role in Oppenheimer, and there is a thematic thread between both characters.
“We never saw this show as Law and Order: Atomic Bomb—like it was going to be ripped from the headlines of history,” Shaw told Vox after the Season 2 finale. Sadly, that episode would become the series finale as WGN America didn’t renew Manhattan. Coming to shows late makes it harder to get annoyed about a canceled-too-soon title (“It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me”). While Shaw’s story was exploring the past, it was caught between the critically acclaimed period darlings like Mad Men and The Americans.
Manhattan’s success was no doubt impacted by debuting on a platform that no one had heard of, when curious eyes had already turned to Netflix. In this case, it is not too late, as there is time to add Manhattan to your summer viewing lineup, whether you watch it before or after Nolan’s epic—or with Barbie thrown in the explosive mix. (We understand if Barbie is your first priority this weekend.)
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