It’s been a minute since we’ve had a Civil War-set miniseries, a genre that proved popular in the 1980s thanks to ABC’s “North and South” (and its soaring Bill Conti score) and CBS’s “The Blue and the Gray.”
PBS took a crack at a Civil War story with the 2016-17 American drama series “Mercy Street,” a creative success that proved too expensive for public TV to sustain.
Amazon’s Prime Video gives the genre a try with 1860-set “The Gray House,” now streaming all eight episodes.
The opening scene resonates in the current ICE era as a Richmond, Va., cop demands to see the “papers” of a Black woman who says she’s free, not a slave.
“We can’t have undocumented (racial slurs) gallivanting around Richmond,” the cop says before squinting at the woman’s paperwork.
“I’ll read it to you if you don’t know how,” the woman says, prompting the cop to tear up her papers. Sounds familiar.
The unexpected timeliness of a series filmed in 2023 seems prescient if a little too on the nose. Alas, that also describes “The Gray House” in general as dialogue hammers home arguments that sound more like something from a middle school textbook than how humans might speak.
At a soiree, Virginia Gov. Henry Wise (Mark Perry) complains about Republicans in Washington and defends slavery, saying, “Our Southern states clothe the world, rich and poor alike, and are richly paid for it. No slaves, no cotton. No cotton, no wealth. No wealth, no progress.”
Like the dialogue, the performances, not including Ben Vereen (“Roots”) and Keith David (“The Lowdown”), often are over-the-top, especially the Southern accents. Maybe Roland Joffre (“Texas Rising”), who directed all episodes, kept saying, “More! More! More!” Some of the wigs are atrocious, too.
Even with these misgivings about scenes so excessive they border on parody, this story of Virginia matriarch Eliza Van Lew (Mary Louise Parker), who is secretly an abolitionist working against the Confederacy to spirit slaves out of the South via the Underground Railroad, is full of stakes. Those stakes create tension and make “The Gray House” occasionally watchable, even if it sometimes prompts unintended laughter. (There’s so much slapping in the “previously on” at the top of Episode 2, it recalls a “Carol Burnett Show” sketch.)
Episode 2 suggests “The Gray House” may be intentional in some comedic beats, at least when it comes to Laurette (Catherine Hannay), Eliza’s racist daughter-in-law who comically overreacts when she thinks she hears a rat in the wall (it’s a slave in hiding). While the use of racial epithets is regrettably necessary to tell this story, it’s not necessary to show a tomboy girl, who seems like she’s intended to be an underage character, topless.
Written by Leslie Greif (“Walker, Texas Ranger”) with Kevin Costner as an executive producer only — the pair worked together when Costner starred in History Channel’s 2012 miniseries “Hatfields & McCoys” — “The Gray House” began development as a Lifetime movie about women spies in the Civil War with the first draft written by acclaimed screenwriter John Sayles (“The Alienist,” 1996’s “Lone Star”). But producers, including Lori McCreary, an executive producer of “The Gray House” alongside Morgan Freeman and his production company Revelations Entertainment, opted to expand “Gray House” into a more personal (re: soapy) story.
For Greif, the appeal of “The Gray House,” the nickname of Jefferson Davis’ White House of the Confederacy in Richmond, was the opportunity to tell a lesser-known Civil War story from multiple angles.
“The thing that I had learned from ‘Hatfields & McCoys,’ the biggest complaint I had gotten about it was, ‘Well, who do you root for? Is it Hatfield or McCoy?’ ” Greif recalled. “What (Costner) loved about our (‘Gray House’) story was we told all the perspectives. There were good and bad on both sides. … We’re trying to tell historical stories that have relevance and impact and import for our lives today, and whether they become a cautionary tale or a cautionary reminder, that’s up to the viewer to decide.”
‘R.J. Decker’
If CBS crime procedurals offer recurring demonstrations of performative machismo, ABC procedurals — “High Potential,” “Will Trent” — take a lighter, less team-focused and more comedic approach to the genre.
That’s certainly true for “R.J. Decker” (10 p.m. March 3, WTAE), written by Rob Doherty (“Elementary”) and starring Scott Speedman (“Grey’s Anatomy”) as the title character, a former photojournalist and ex-con who starts over as a private investigator.
Decker lives in a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., trailer park full of colorful characters with his trailer on the precipice of a sinkhole. Decker has an ex-wife who’s now married to a woman, and he has an ongoing relationship with the daughter of a Florida politician.
“Decker” is based on Carl Hiaasen’s “Double Whammy,” and it’s got the same Florida-is-weird vibe as “Bad Monkey” and the short-lived “Maximum Bob.”
In the “R.J. Decker” opening scene, a woman comes upon Decker sitting on courthouse steps holding a candy bar. She says he looks like an “unhoused individual.”
“This is Florida. You can just say ‘crazy homeless guy,’ ” Decker replies.
That’s representative of the lighter tone that makes “Decker” rise slightly above its procedural trappings.
Taylor goes full time
Congrats to Josh Taylor, who moved into a full-time role with KDKA-TV this week.
Taylor has been working as a part-time news freelancer for the station since July 2024. He’ll continue to be a jack-of-all-trades, anchoring and reporting where needed.
“I’m the guy who built the first two decades of my career doing just about everything and holding several different jobs all at once,” Taylor posted to Facebook. “Starting today, I’m a Swiss Army knife in just ONE place, and I’m so excited to get started.”
Of local note
Pittsburgh’s Horror Realm Con (Feb. 27-March 1 at DoubleTree by Hilton Pittsburgh Green Tree hotel) welcomes Pittsburgh native, director and makeup effects artist Greg Nicotero (“The Walking Dead”) among others this weekend. Details at horrorrealmcon.com.
