Tyrant

I finally got around to watching the pilot of Tyrant. The protagonist is the son of a brutal Middle Eastern dictator. The son had gone into self-imposed exile at age 16 and became a pediatrician in Los Angeles. He and his nuclear family go back to the Old Country for his nephew's wedding and, as you might imagine, shit happens.

The country seems to be loosely based on Syria, though there are differences. One is that being the dictator of that country is the family business gong back several generations, which is pretty much not true of any nation in the Middle East, other than Iran. The similarities are that the dictator's son who was the heir apparent died in a car crash, leaving the son who was a doctor in charge. For Syria, the time between the first son dying and the dictator croaking was several years, not the greatly-compressed timeline of the show.

In the pilot, the doctor becomes really withdrawn once he and his family make the trip. His wife is rather clueless, she apparently pressured him into making the trip so he could have closure or some such nonsense. Their son is vapid and shallow and their daughter, like her father, wanted to stay home in LA.

In watching it, the only thing that was not boringly predictable was the series of flashbacks to an assassination attempt thirty years previously. Without that, I'd have written this one off. But I'll watch a few more to see if F/X can do this without it being a one-dimensional cartoon.

Though "cartoon" isn't the right word, for there are more subtleties in an average episode of the Simpsons than there was in Tyrant.