Low Winter Sun

For those looking for yet another quality show for their Sunday nights, Low Winter Sun soars high.

Not since HBO’s The Wire left the air five years ago has a television series combined urban decay and moral decrepitude in such stark--and yet compulsively watchable--terms.

There's lots of snarling, lots of talk about what men are willing to do to protect or hurt one another, and yet in the early going it feels empty, like a joke being retold by someone who can't remember exactly how the guy he heard it from delivered it. The performances are terrific, though (James especially), and Dickerson shoots the Detroit locations in a fashion that captures both the beauty of the architecture and the absolute bleakness of the setting.

Low on initial appeal and likewise short on originality, it’s a bleak ’n’ grim undertaking that just doesn’t seem built for the long haul.

Sun aspires to the breadth if not the depth of The Wire. But it's so self-conscious in its existential misery, lacking the leavening humor and humanity of a modern classic like Breaking Bad, that it often feels more punishing than provocative.

It comes off as a straining, overly serious wannabe.

It tries to make up for what it lacks in originality with unending bleakness--Malick shots of a mangy dog running through the streets with a rat in his maw, characters who never smile--as if being relentlessly somber were proof of quality. The results are beyond claustrophobic. All the characters want out. So did I.