Not Even André Holland's Considerable Charisma Is Enough to Light Up The Big Cigar

Near the end of The Big Cigar, a six-episode limited series from Jim Hecht, Huey P. Newton sits down at a typewriter, musing over how to tell a story and how each one has multiple storytellers and thus different versions. He then references (via typically clunky voiceover narration) a classic moment from the John Ford Western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, in which one character says “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” 

The notion of printing the legend — turning into fact a series of mistruths simply because the latter is more compelling — is not new to how Hollywood approaches history. And The Big Cigar begins each episode with a lengthy title card essentially telling the audience that some of the details in the series have been fudged. But the end result is a series that seems very willing to print the legend without making that legend terribly compelling.

The good news about The Big Cigar is that Newton is played by the ever-charismatic Andre Holland. As the firebrand who helped co-found the Black Panther Party in the 1960s, Holland brings Newton to life in such a way to make the seemingly ridiculous story focused on the man feel believable enough and intriguing, at least on the surface. Echoing another character’s discussion of Hollywood biopics during the series, The Big Cigar isn’t about Newton’s entire life, but about a specific moment in time. 

It’s set primarily in the mid-1970s, when he had to resort to being smuggled out of the United States and into Cuba to avoid being wrongfully arrested for the murder of a young woman. His trip to the Communist-run country is aided by two flashy film producers, Bert Schneider (Alessandro Nivola) and Stephen Blauner (P.J. Byrne), who mount a fake movie production bearing the same name as the show itself to disguise their real goal.

As developed by Hecht, who recently oversaw the HBO series Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, The Big Cigar tries to creatively encompass the standard-issue tropes of modern biopics (even in televisual form), while also bouncing around in time and aiming for a mildly raunchy vibe amidst the glitz of the New Hollywood of the 1970s. That means there are plenty of scenes in which side characters deride Newton, Schneider, and Blauner (separately or together) for pursuing this dangerous course of action, and where they defend their actions as righteous. 

But there’s plenty of shifting in time as we see not only Newton’s rise in power, his fractious relationships with other members of the Black Panther Party, but also glimpses into Schneider’s own gaudy and orgiastic personal life and his increased interest in more socially liberal causes. The latter part is where The Big Cigar stumbles often. It’s nothing against Alessandro Nivola, who’s a talented actor doing his best with scattershot material, but just the optics alone of watching how a white man is even mildly radicalized by his Black counterpart are head-scratching in the year of our lord 2024. (There is perhaps no more baffling moment than when Schneider calls Newton his best friend midway through the series, despite there being little evidence to show that this is either accurate or something that Newton would reciprocate.) 

Neither Nivola nor Byrne — who both do fine in their respective roles — are able to make their characters so fascinating that shifting focus away from Newton so frequently in the series’s six episodes makes any creative sense. That’s as much a comment on Holland’s innately convincing and solid performance as it is on the reality that a story about Huey P. Newton attempting to get smuggled into Cuba to avoid prosecution in the United States ought to be squarely about y’know, Huey P. Newton. The many shifts into the story of two men who risk a moderate amount of their personal reputation to help him along are far less involving. 

Arguably some of the expansion of the story to focus on Schneider and his relationship with his Hollywood-exec father and brother (John Doman and Noah Emmerich, respectively) or on Blauner and his tense relationship with his girlfriend (Jaime Ray Newman) implies a feature film that ballooned into a TV series. It’s a point in this show’s favor that none of its six episodes pushes well past 40 minutes (excluding credits), but each time Hecht or his fellow writers stray from Newton, they fail to justify making even this brief of a limited series at all.

That sense is never stronger than when the show allows the equivalent of a C-plot to focus on the other regular character, undercover federal agent Sydney Clark (Marc Menchaca). Clark could have made for a Javert-esque corollary to Newton, someone who decries Newton’s entire belief system but is so deep under as a stereotypical-looking hippie who only feels free when involved in a romance with a genuine hippie. The idea of the character is enough to merit inclusion, and Menchaca does his best with a woefully underwritten role. But the fact that the scripts treat him like an afterthought makes it easy to wonder why Clark’s in the series at all. Schneider and Blauner may take the spotlight away from Newton at different points of The Big Cigar, but they were at least more directly involved in Newton’s move to Cuba, whereas Clark feels like an unnecessary amalgam of The Man.

It’s difficult to look at The Big Cigar and wish that there was more to it, or to imagine a version that felt slightly less sanitized. This is not Apple TV+’s first historical limited series — it’s not even the streamer’s first historical limited series of the year, arriving after Masters of the Air, Manhunt, and Franklin. All four series boast solid budgets, distinctive stories, and recognizable names in front of and behind the camera. (The first two episodes of The Big Cigar are directed by Don Cheadle.) Of the four, only Masters of the Air felt less standard-issue in its scope and scale.

Both Franklin and The Big Cigar have an air of looking the part of prestige TV but not representing all that the small-screen medium has to offer. The Big Cigar cannot help but avoid the perception of just being a modern-day version of the kind of sanded-down, overly polished biopic Hollywood loves to make, down to its ending, which quite predictably informs us exactly what happened to its major players afterwards. If the idea of The Big Cigar, and really the idea of making a show like this with presumed creative freedom and a big budget, is compelling, the execution certainly isn’t. 

The Big Cigar premieres May 17 on Apple TV+ with two episodes. New episodes drop every Friday. Join the discussion about the show in our forums.

Josh Spiegel is a writer and critic who lives in Phoenix with his wife, two sons, and far too many cats. Follow him on Bluesky at @mousterpiece.