he problem with a hype show, of course, is the “getting excited about it” part. Oh, a big-budget HBO series based on the? If life has taught me anything it is this: when something sounds too good to be true, it normally is. There is no way The Sympathizer can live up to that.
Except, well, hmm. I’m starting to suspect this might be one of those cosmic occurrences where TV just gets everything right. The Sympathizer starts in Vietnam, and dips back there regularly – we follow Xuande’s anonymous Captain, both as he attempts to flee a collapsing Saigon and as he settles into a refugee community in Los Angeles , and the timeline jumps around a lot, and satisfyingly.
The Sympathizer leans easily and heavily on many genre tropes – there’s spy stuff, but not too much: you’re very rarely watching a man try to open a secret drawer while dramatic music tells you what to feel about it – but remembers to have human characters in place to pull the Captain’s loyalties this way and that, so you actually care whether he gets caught being in a corridor he shouldn’t be in or sweating while telling a lie.
It’s Downey Jr who’s trying hard to steal the show, though. His role is to play as many roles as possible – each episode he plays a different antagonist to the Captain, sometimes a former professor and sometimes a CIA mentor and sometimes a congressman and sometimes a caricature of Francis Ford Coppola – and he gnaws through cigars and bald caps and bonkers voices as he does so .