Harry Treadaway (“Penny Dreadful”) plays Brady Hartsfeld, a full-time IT repairman who makes house calls when he’s not stocking shelves at an electronics store. Flashing forward after the accident to his retirement, the case opened from that vehicular homicide remains unsolved, but who was behind the clown mask is not a mystery to the audience. Mercedes” specifically tracks Hodges’ (Brendan Gleeson) pursuit of the killer from the series’ opening moments. Lehane has spent time in writing rooms for “The Wire,” the second season of “Bloodline,” and “Boardwalk Empire”: He knows his way around a character-driven mystery, be it in book-form or as a screenplay, and his handling of this tricky material exhibits the deft touch needed to make it work.) Mercedes” is the one written by an experienced mystery novelist. (Extended side note: Call it the bias of a lifelong Dennis Lehane fan, but I do not think it’s a coincidence the best, most powerful episode of “Mr. In four episodes given to critics, the fourth carries quite a bit of promise while the preceding three all but bury an intriguing yarn under a mountain of blunt force trauma. The show feels structurally similar to other TV tales tracking cops and criminals, aside from those alarming factors. Such a choice makes some sense when considering the series is adapted from Stephen King’s novel, but less so when realizing it’s not that kind of Stephen King story. Mercedes” treats the inciting incident of its cat-and-mouse detective story as a horror show. In the era of “too much TV,” the need to make a resounding first impression is understandable, but “Mr. Sitting idle long enough to draw attention from the sleepy crowd, including a mother with her baby and a kind man with a tightly-wrapped sleeping bag, the driver suddenly shifts into gear and speeds through the screaming bystanders.Īs described, this is a deeply disturbing event. He pulls up to a line of people, who are waiting to meet potential employers during the fiscally-tumultuous times of 2009. Though not outside the fast food chain and with more mysterious intent than the aforementioned event, a man in a clown mask sits behind the wheel of a Mercedes sedan.

Inspired by an actual tragedy - when a woman drove her car into a crowd of people at a McDonalds’ job fair - the new Audience Network drama recreates the crime in gruesome detail. Mercedes” opens with a scene as telling to the series’ successes as its failures.

Mr mercedes by stephen king