Starz's newest dramatic series, created by Justin Marks, is a showcase for Academy Award winning character actor and insurance pitchman J. K. Simmons. The former J. Jonah Jameson and present-day Commissioner Gordon gets to play a dual role in this high-concept sci-fi show. He plays Howard Silk, a mild-mannered Berlin-based UN bureaucrat going through a grave crisis. His wife Emily (Olivia Williams) is in a coma following a traffic accident, and her relatives' lawyer is badgering Howard to have her moved to a British facility. He faces a whole new crisis when his superiors bring him face to face with himself. Howard learns that sometime in the 1980s a portal to an alternate universe opened in East Berlin; that his office has been responsible for monitoring traffic between the universes; and that people on "the other side" are physically identical to their "prime" selves, but otherwise very different. The other Howard Silk, despite looking as much a chinless wonder as the first one, is an arrogant badass who works at a higher level for the equivalent agency to our Howard's. He's here against protocol to warn of an assassination attempt against comatose Emily. He thwarts the attempt, but the assassin, a tomboyish woman known as Baldwin (Sara Serraiocco), escapes to kill another day, albeit scarred by a bullet through her right cheek. In drips and drabs, our Howard, suddenly promoted and sent to the other side to impersonate his other self, learns of a long-simmering conspiracy to infiltrate other-side sleeper agents, changelings in effect, in place of disappeared civilians, the better to carry out terrorist attacks. You see, the two universes have evolved different histories: 9/11 never happened on the other side, but the world was devastated by a plague that many there blame on our side. The other Howard is trying to thwart the conspiracy of vengeance, and so is another important figure in their intelligence bureaucracy: the other Emily, whose husband had said was dead. We learn eventually that our Emily was involved as well, and was targeted for vehicular assassination for that reason. Despite their clashing personalities, the two Howards must work in concert, if not really together, in spite of compromised bureaucracies on both sides, to stop the sleeper agents from carrying out their vengeance agenda.
The best and simplest praise I can give Simmons is that you can always tell which Howard you're dealing with thanks to their different styles of dialogue and other details of body language. The actor deserves still more credit because the differences between the Howards can't be reduced to any obvious "mirror universe" dichotomy. If you must make Star Trek comparisons, than Counterpart puts me more in mind of the episode where Captain Kirk is split into two people, each an imperfect version of his true self, one dangerously passive, the other violently aggressive. The two Howards don't differ in the same way, but you can see that each has qualities the other lacks, for better or worse. This is best illustrated as our Howard befriends the other Emily and meets a daughter who doesn't exist in his world, both unsurprisingly estranged from their Howard -- who, we learn, was corresponding with our Emily before the "accident," and who indignantly discovers her affair with another man. It tells us a lot about the two Howards that the other Howard throws this in our Howard's face the first chance he gets -- only to be told that our Howard knew but forgave Emily -- but has not yet told our Howard by season's end that our Emily is waking from her coma. For that matter, he'd at first told our Howard that his own wife, the other Emily, was dead. For all that, there's no problem accepting the other Howard as a good guy, or at least that he's on the right side, since there's no sympathy to be had for the sleeper conspiracy. The most we get is a closer look at one sleeper who's murdered and replaced her counterpart, the wife (Nazanin Boniadi) of a high-ranking figure in Howard's agency (Harry Lloyd), whose child she's borne. Neither is really very sympathetic, so one can view their subplot with relative objectivity. Meanwhile, the show's focus on Baldwin often seems like a distraction from the main story. We learn that her counterpart in our world was a concert violinist who gets killed during an attempt to take out Baldwin herself, while Baldwin enters a lesbian relationship with the violinist's close friend who discovers the truth implausibly late. It will all seem a waste if Serraiocco leaves the show as the season-finale suggests, but I suspect the writers have more in store for her unless the actress has gotten another gig already. But if the point of Baldwin is ultimately elusive, it matters little since Counterpart remains The J.K. Simmons Show despite strong performances from Williams, Lloyd, Boniadi and others, including an effetely malevolent Stephen Rea as an other-side spymaster. It's very rare for someone like Simmons to get an opportunity like this and he definitely makes the most of it. He makes such a strong impression here that not only will I be back to watch the second season, but I'll be calling the guy in the Farmers commercials "Howard" for the foreseeable future.
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