The Brink: Nuclear Comedy

It's September, which means the fall TV season is almost upon us. In a few weeks my DVR will be brimming with new seasons of my old favorites. However, before that happens, I need to acknowledge some of the new summer shows that kept me entertained while everyone else was on hiatus. First up, HBO's The Brink.

The Brink follows a series of escalating events in Pakistan that could lead to all-out nuclear war. And yes, it's a comedy. Tim Robbins plays the US Secretary of State, Walter Larson, a brilliant strategist with a highly questionable personal life, who has to put up with the war-mongering buffoons that comprise the President's Cabinet. Jack Black plays Alex Talbot, a low-level diplomat at the American Embassy in Islamabad, who has high ambitions, but can't attain them as he's actually high most of the time. When Pakistan faces a military coup, Alex inadvertently gets entangled in the ensuing political maelstrom and becomes Larson's liaison, feeding him information and helping him develop a strategy to prevent World War III.

Other main characters include Alex's Pakistani driver, Rafiq Massoud (Aasif Mandvi), who is horrified that Alex is now in charge of saving Pakistan from disaster. Then there's Lieutenant Commander Zeke Tilson (Pablo Schreiber) and Lieutenant Glenn Taylor (Eric Ladin), navy pilots who are very skilled but also have an unfortunate tendency to ruin missions by getting high (yes, there's a lot of drug-fueled incompetence going on in this show - it is HBO after all). They get into a variety of scrapes that threaten to derail all attempts at peaceful negotiation and along the way meet up with some incredibly eccentric characters played by two British actors I adore. I was fairly ambivalent about The Brink, but those cameos in episode five certainly sucked me right back in.

The Brink is quite broad and lacks the nuance and biting political satire of something like Veep. There are a lot of characters to keep track of, which can be a bit of a challenge at the beginning, but it does pay off towards the end as story lines begin to intersect and complicate matters further. It does its best work in the small moments when a piece of particularly silly political maneuvering is thwarting all attempts to save humanity. My biggest problem with the show was that apart from Iqbal Theba, who plays the Pakistani General Umair Zaman who stages the coup, the other "Pakistani" characters made me cringe when they spoke Urdu. Hollywood casting directors don't seem to care when they cast brown actors, but for pity's sake, cast people who actually know how to speak the language. Or just make them speak in English.

If you're a fan of political satires that skewer the incompetence prevalent at the highest levels of government, you will probably enjoy The Brink. It isn't high comedy (well it features a lot of people getting high but...you know what I mean) but it is ten short episodes of dependable hilarity. If you're looking for a concentrated dose of comedy this long weekend, this might be the show for you.