{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "canonicalUrl": "https://frankhecker.com/2014/10/19/tv-worth-watching-manhattan/",
  "path": "/2014/10/19/tv-worth-watching-manhattan/",
  "publishedAt": "2014-10-19T12:00:58.000Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:77mn3ult3b72tpvtqqva6tat/site.standard.publication/3mpfmfpu4u72n",
  "tags": [
    "manhattan",
    "misc",
    "science",
    "tv"
  ],
  "textContent": "{{< figure src=\"/assets/images/manhattan-frank-winter-charlie-isaacs-embed.jpg\" link=\"/assets/images/manhattan-frank-winter-charlie-isaacs.jpg\" alt=\"Picture of Frank Winter (John Benjamin Hickey) and Charlie Isaacs (Ashley Zuckerman)\" caption=\"Frank Winter (John Benjamin Hickey) and Charlie Isaacs (Ashley Zuckerman), physicist protagonists of the WGN America television series _Manhattan_\" >}}\n\ntl;dr: _[Manhattan][Manhatt]_ is a quality TV show about the people racing to build an atomic bomb, and their families.  It’s well worth watching, but you’ll enjoy it more if you remember you’re not tuned to the History Channel.\n\nSometimes people say that a particular TV show is “the best thing you’re not watching.“  With respect to _Manhattan_ the second part of this is certainly true; the [show’s ratings][shows] are pretty low, even in this age of niche shows and fragmented audiences.  The first part I can’t definitively speak for, since I don’t watch a lot of TV, but in general I like _Manhattan_ and definitely recommend you check it out---hence this blog post.\n\nBriefly, _Manhattan_ is a (very heavily) fictionalized telling of the race to create the first atomic bomb, focusing on the scientific community at Los Alamos, New Mexico.  It’s about the actual Manhattan project in the same sense that the movie _[MASH][])_ was about the real-life Korean War---just as _MASH_ used an early-1950s setting to explore 1960s Vietnam-era attitudes, _Manhattan_ is an effort to search for the roots of the post-9/11 “war on terror” and its subsequent fallout (Guantanamo Bay, Wikileaks, Edward Snowden, and so on) in the secret World War II-era scientific and engineering efforts that led to the creation of the national security establishment and the military-industrial complex.\n\n{{< figure src=\"/assets/images/los-alamos-entrance-manhattan-embed.jpg\" link=\"/assets/images/los-alamos-entrance-manhattan.jpg\" alt=\"Picture of the Los Alamos entrance on the set of Manhattan\" caption=\"The entrance to the Los Alamos “tech area” on the WGN America television series _Manhattan_.\" >}}\n\nIt’s a pretty weighty premise for a TV show, and the scientific nature of a lot of the plot is a further barrier for prospective viewers just looking for an hour’s entertainment.  (For example, one of the major plot points hinges on the fact that the element plutonium used in atomic weapons has [multiple isotopes][multipl], one of which, P-240, undergoes spontaneous fission much more readily than the more common isotope P-239.)  The show is produced by the fledging network [WGN America][WGN Ame], apparently in an attempt to establish itself as a serious player in the “prestige television” market, similar to what _Mad Men_ did for AMC.\n\nUnfortunately 1940s physicists are not as relatable to most people as 1960s advertising executives, which may help account the low ratings.  When I started writing this post I didn’t know whether WGN America was willing to subsidize the show any further, and I thought I’d be writing an obituary rather than a recommendation.  Happily WGNA recently decided to [renew the show][renew t] for a second season.\n\nSo, why should you watch _Manhattan_?  First, the historical and scientific background is genuinely interesting, especially for a former physics major like me but I think potentially for others as well.  We all know how this show ends (with the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) but the path to working atomic weapons was long and fraught with difficulties---for a while it was unclear whether it was even possible to build a working bomb.  _Manhattan_, like almost all TV shows and movies, takes some liberties with the actual scientific facts, but the core of the story is real, and the key problems that the protagonists face are the same problems that their real-life counterparts strove to overcome.\n\nFollowing on from the previous point, it’s great to see fictional characters who (no matter their personal foibles) are intelligent and competent---people you can actually believe could solve major technical problems.  (Even the non-physicist characters are generally pretty smart people; with perhaps one or two exceptions no one comes off as an idiot.)  It’s a refreshing change from TV shows and movies where scientists are played as overly-confident villians or comedic ivory-tower types.  (As an prime example of the latter I give you _The Big Bang Theory_, a show that I found to be utterly unwatchable the one time I tried to watch it.)\n\n{{< figure src=\"/assets/images/manhattan-cast-embed.jpg\" link=\"/assets/images//manhattan-cast.jpg\" alt=\"Cast of Manhattan in character\" caption=\"The cast of _Manhattan_, including Ashley Zuckerman and Rachel Brosnahan (left and second from left) as Charlie and Abby Isaacs, and John Benjamin Hickey and Olivia Williams (fifth and sixth from left) as Frank and Liza Winter.\" >}}\n\nFinally, the cast (of mostly unknowns, at least to me) is almost uniformly excellent.  The actors portraying the main protagonists do a particularly good job in my opinion, but really pretty much everyone in the main cast is spot-on.  They’re helped out by the writing; I can think of only a few instances where the combination of writing and actor came off as somewhat cartoonish.\n\nManhttan is by no means a perfect show.  A lot of people commenting on the Facebook page take issue with the ”soap opera” aspects of the show.  Some of this is attributable to the desire of the show’s creators to highlight the human drama inherent in being uprooted from normal life and plopped in the middle of a jerry-built secret city in the middle of the New Mexico desert, especially for spouses and children left behind while the (mostly) men-folk went off to “the Hill” to toil on tasks they couldn’t talk about when they came back home for the night.\n\nSome of it is also due to trying to keep viewers from fuzzing out during the science-y parts, in anticipation of some juicy action and intrigue to follow.  As one example, there have been two deaths by gunshot thus far, which is one more than occurred during the entire history of the Manhattan project, an enterprise that employed 130,000 people at its height.\n\nAnother issue is that _Manhattan_ (like many other TV series and movies) often anachronistically projects back into a former time the attitudes and issues of the present-day.  For example, as noted above a premise of the show in exploring the roots of present-day secrecy in the race to build an atomic bomb.  But in fact the real-life scientists in Los Alamos apparently weren’t quite as oppressed by security concerns as the fictional scientists on the show, and for the most part behaved as scientists typically do in terms of sharing information and cooperating amongst themselves.  (That would change, but not until after World War II when the Cold War began in earnest.)\n\nThe show also touches on various social issues, pretty much all of which get the standard “Hollywood liberal” treatment.  Again, there’s a partial excuse for this, since the scientists at Los Alamos were part of an American intelligentsia that even in the 1940s was pretty socially liberal, but it sometimes comes across as a bit didactic.\n\nThese issues keep _Manhattan_ from being truly great in my opinion, but it’s still one of the better shows I’ve seen in the past few years.  Tonight is the season finale (at 10 pm Eastern on WGN America, channels 29 and 568 on FiOS TV in Howard County), but if you’re like me you can catch it on [Hulu][] at your convenience.\n\nFor those interested in reading more about the show, unfortunately, unlike many other “prestige” shows _Manhattan_ hasn’t gotten a lot of attention on pop-culture sites.  The best sources for commentrary and recaps are at science writer Jennifer Oulette’s “[Cocktail Party Physics][Cocktai]” blog, the “[Science Fact vs. Fiction][Science]” section on the web site of Popular Mechanics magazine, and on the web site of the [Atomic Heritage Foundation][Atomic], a nonprofit seeking to preserve historical sites and records associated with the Manhattan project.  (The latter is a worthy project to which I recently [donated][].)  The [Los Alamos Historical Society][Los Ala] also has some [interesting material][interes] contrasting the show’s vision of Los Alamos compared to the real thing.\n\nIf you do decide to try out _Manhattan_ I hope you enjoy it as much as I do, and if so we can look forward together to the second season.\n\n\n    The Manhattan project was actually just one component of this birth.  Others included the creation and large-scale deployment of radar, the British project to break the German Enigma code---itself to be explored in the upcoming movie _[The Imitation Game][The Imi]_---and the parallel creation of the National Security Agency and other agencies that today make up what insiders call “the IC” (“intelligence community”).\n\n\n\n[Manhatt]: http://wgnamerica.com/shows/manhattan\n[shows]: http://tvseriesfinale.com/tv-show/manhattan-season-one-ratings-33487/\n[MASH]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MASH_(film\n[multipl]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_plutonium\n[WGN Ame]: http://wgnamerica.com/about\n[renew t]: http://variety.com/2014/tv/news/wgn-america-renews-manhattan-for-season-2-1201329175/ \"WGN America Renews ‘Manhattan’ for Season 2\"\n[Hulu]: http://www.hulu.com/manhattan\n[Cocktai]: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cocktail-party-physics/tag/manhattan/\n[Science]: http://www.popularmechanics.com/archive/technology/digital/fact-vs-fiction/\n[Atomic]: http://www.atomicheritage.org\n[donated]: https://donatenow.networkforgood.org/AtomicHeritageFoundation\n[Los Ala]: http://www.losalamoshistory.org\n[interes]: http://www.losalamoshistory.org/manhattan_discussion_intro.htm\n[this in]: http://www.thewrap.com/manhattan-creator-on-doomsday-drama-americans-never-met-an-apocalypse-they-didnt-like/ \"‘Manhattan’ Creator on Doomsday Drama: ‘Americans Never Met an Apocalypse They Didn’t Like’\"\n[The Imi]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imitation_Game\n[Jewish]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_quota",
  "title": "TV worth watching: Manhattan"
}