David E. Kelley's A Man in Full Comes Apart at the Seams

While Atlanta has become a hotspot for filming thanks to significant tax incentives, it’s still a bit of a novelty whenever a film or TV show actually uses the city as its setting rather than, say, try to pass off the High Museum of Art as the British Museum. Even shows famous for being set there, like Atlanta and The Walking Dead, left the confines of the city eventually, not to mention making a somewhat generous interpretation of locales.

A Man in Full, David E. Kelley’s limited series adaptation of Tom Wolfe's novel of the same name, stands out just by virtue of featuring the Bank of America Plaza in both its posters and in the skyline view from the view of an office building. That office belongs to one Charlie Croker, a real-estate magnate known as the man who built the city — specifically, a gleaming glass and steel tower known as the Croker Concourse. 

If you’ve spent any time in Southern high society, you’ve met this guy; Jeff Daniels gets much of the intonation of his voice right, this regional specificity that only occasionally falters into something else. Croker is a pillar of the community with the perfect Buckhead house and trophy wife (Sarah Jones) to boot — a master of the universe, if you will. He is also in a massive amount of debt and the bank has come a-calling, courtesy of wormy loan officer Raymond Peepgrass (Tom Pelphry), who hates him with the fiery passion only known to those writhing in jealousy. 

On top of that, there’s William Jackson Harper’s dickish mayor Wes Jordan, embroiled in a campaign against an open racist and sifting through dirt to find something to take him down. Charlie’s fixer Roger White (Aml Ameen) might be able to assist, but he’s thrown into helping out the husband (Jon Michael Hill as Conrad) of Charlie’s secretary (Chanté Adams as Jill), who’s in Fulton County Prison after a traffic altercation in which he punched a cop. 

If that sounds like a lot, well… it is. A Man in Full’s pilot juggles a lot of elements, including a brief appearance of Charlie’s ex-wife Martha (Diane Lane) and her friend/lover(?), the beauty guru Joyce Newman (Lucy Liu). With only six episodes and a 742-page novel to work with, the show never stops feeling overstuffed, even with what must be a plethora of cuts. 

Early on, these various stories don’t seem connected, but gradually they start to knot together to form a pretty compelling study in contrasts between Charlie and Conrad: Both are men in crisis who stand to lose everything but in dramatically different fashions. In that sense, A Man in Full comes close to interrogating the particular racial politics baked into all Southern interactions, though, because of the length of the series, it’s difficult to tell whether these aspects were overlooked or simply cut for time. (It’s perhaps telling that Roger’s nickname in the novel, “Too White,” isn’t ever mentioned in the show, though the very fact that he and his lawyer wife live in a very nice Buckhead home suggests this tension.) Curiously, the show opens with voiceover but never returns to it; whatever development there was on the page hasn’t quite made it to the screen. 

Kelley, the prolific procedural producer that he is, seems to be more interested in that side of things than Charlie’s story. Conrad and Jill’s kafkaesque nightmare through the legal system at the behest of a hardass judge brings to mind something like If Beale Street Could Talk, and not just because Regina King directed half the season. King demonstrates a fine command within the confines of Netflix’s house style, injecting tension throughout the proceedings, especially in one of Kelley’s signature courtroom scenes. Her later episodes provide a glimpse into how the prison environment warps a person’s behavior until that itself is weaponized in a malicious downward spiral. 

Thomas Schlamme’s episodes are sturdily directed themselves. It’s the substance of the writing that feels a bit lacking here. There’s a definite sense that Charlie’s history has been edited down, so that we’re told constantly he deserves what’s coming to him and that he’s hated by many in Atlanta without really understanding why. To be fair, it’s easy to see where that hatred could come from. He’s prone to yelling in the boardroom at both his rivals and his subordinates; he gifts Raymond with the not-at-all-suggestive nickname “Peepy”; and, in a decision that befuddles both his wife and his teenage son, attempts to woo an investor by showing him the magic of horse breeding. 

Charlie funding Conrad’s legal defense without seeming to expect much of anything in return, despite the fact that there are hints he’s approaching insolvency, is an intriguing development, albeit one that has the effect of making him look like he’s not that bad, all things considered. His quest in the back half to find an alleged sexual assault victim to provide dirt for Wes Jordan’s campaign shows the self-preservation promised in the synopsis, as well as fleshes out another character. But there’s just not enough shading of who Charlie is and what he’s done to the people around him. A Man in Full seems split on whether it wants to chart a tragic downfall or revel in schadenfreude, and as a result is less than satisfying.

Lopsided and underdeveloped as it is, A Man in Full goes down as smooth as a nice glass of bourbon on a hot day. The cast is uniformly excellent; as banker Harry Zale, Bill Camp steals scenes from everyone around him, getting some of the funniest line readings around (“We got your medical records. Turns out you’re a p*ssy.”). Harper is charming as hell as a politician with just a hint of slime, disguising his dickishness behind a wide smile and gregarious speech. Ameen, Hill, and Adams could carry a series of their own on the strength of their performances as well, while Lane and Liu hold their own despite being a bit underused, their presence not quite coming together until the last couple episodes. The city’s glitzier regions also nab the spotlight; Buckhead features prominently, as well as downtown and Ponce de Leon. 

While it can feel like Kelley hasn’t quite managed to integrate Wolfe’s presumed analysis and texture of the city, it does at least show spots like the Bistro restaurant or the Five Points MARTA Station. All of this paced at a reasonable clip so that six hours goes by in a flash. It may not be as filling as previous Kelley triumphs, like Big Little Lies, but it’s a welcome addition to Atlanta on film. 

A Man in Full is now streaming on Netflix. Join the discussion about the show in our forums. 

Devan Suber is a writer living in Philadelphia.