Manhattan, on WGN America
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Caution: spoilers!

This is something I wanted to check out partly because of the premise, of course. And because one of the stars is Olivia Williams. The cast also includes Mark Moses, whom I mainly know from Desperate Housewives, and Daniel Stern, whom I mainly know from the "Home Alone" movies (though I must say that even knowing it was him, it took several episodes before I was able to recognize him in this). I don't think I know anyone else in the cast. It's the second original series to air on WGN America, having begun after the first season of Salem ended. And I enjoyed that. I'm glad I did give the show a try, as it's a good story, with good acting all around.

Anyway... "Manhattan" is about the Manhattan Project. It's set in 1943, in Los Alamos, New Mexico. (I'm sure many details of the plot will diverge to some extent from historical fact, but I'm also sure the show does a fair job of representing the spirit of this part of American history.) The project is under the direction of Professor Robert Oppenheimer, but we don't actually see much of him. There are two different teams of scientists and mathematicians working to develop a nuclear bomb. One team is working on a design called "Thin Man." It's led by Dr. Reed Akley, who recruits a brilliant young man named Dr. Charlie Isaacs to join his team. Charlie and his wife, Abby, move to the secret Army base in Los Alamos where the project is being conducted. (They also have a son who is too young to be of any importance to the plot.) It doesn't seem like any of the other people on Akley's team are of any importance to the story, even though that's the team that is favored by the Army, and gets all the best resources. The other team is led by Dr. Frank Winter; his team work on an alternative to Thin Man which is just referred to as "implosion," though I don't think I heard that term for the first few episodes.) Frank lives in Los Alamos with his botanist wife, Dr. Liza Winter (Williams), and their teenage daughter, Callie. (I'm not sure exactly how old Callie is supposed to be, but the actress is in her early 20s.) Anyway, Charlie had had some kind of scientific paper published, which had apparently impressed everyone in the scientific community except Frank, who I guess had rejected it before it was published. Or something. I kind of got the impression that Charlie was intrigued by Frank because of this, but... they quickly develop an antagonistic relationship, after Charlie moves to town.

There are several people on Frank's team, whom we see more of than we do of Akley's team. One is Dr. Glen Babbit (Stern), who had been Frank's teacher, like 20 years ago. And there's a scientist named Dr. Helen Prins, the only woman on the team. It took several episodes before any of the other people on Frank's team became memorable to me at all, with one exception: a Chinese-American named Dr. Sid Liao, who is falsely accused by the Army of being a spy. (The reasons for the accusation aren't false, but... it's complicated. And it leads to Frank feeling a lot of guilt.) In the second episode, Sid gets killed by a private named Cole Dunlavey, who immediately regrets his action, even though it had seemed necessary at the time. He thinks he'll get discharged for what he did, but instead he gets a promotion from Colonel Alden Cox (Moses), the head of the Army base. Cox orders Dunlavey to lie about finding stolen documents in Sid's car, which supports the story that he was a spy. (In spite of this, Cox doesn't seem to be a bad guy... but again, things are complicated.) Later in the season, Cole will become romantically involved with Callie.

Anyway, Sid's death provides a lot of drama for everyone, but there was already plenty of drama for other reasons. There's the fact that all the scientists are working on a project that could be the most important thing ever, but it also has moral implications that they must put out of their minds. And they can't talk to anyone about what they're doing, not even their wives, or they could be accused of treason. And there's the fact that Frank's team appears to have the better chance of designing a bomb that could be made faster than Akley's team, but they can't put their theory into practice because they don't receive the resources they need from the Army. And there's the fact that the Nazis have their own project, trying to develop a nuclear bomb. So it's not just a race between Frank and Akley's team, the more important race is between America and Germany. So every day that passes means thousands more people dying in the war. So that's hanging over everyone's head. Meanwhile, Abby Isaacs has a really hard time adjusting to life on the base, but she eventually gets a job as a switchboard operator, where she meets a French woman named Elodie Lancefield, whose husband, Tom, is a scientist on Akley's team. Elodie becomes a close friend to Abby, and introduces her to some progressive ways of thinking. Meanwhile, Liza Winter may be accustomed to life in Los Alamos, but that doesn't mean she likes it. And her marriage seems to be strained by the fact that Frank is required to keep secrets from her; that is understandably very hard on both of them. Liza also has some other problems, which I don't want to reveal. But I will say she's not fond of how the Army runs things in Los Alamos.

I should mention the other characters on the implosion team. (I'm not calling any of them "Doctor" because as of this writing, Wikipedia doesn't, and I'm really not sure how many of the scientists on this show are or are not doctors. In fact I tend not to remember anyone's particular field of science, or even whether they're scientists or mathematicians.) There's a British scientist named Paul Crosley, who seems to mainly be interested in furthering his own career, and doesn't generally seem like a particularly nice guy, though he can be. And he eventually gets involved with Helen, though that's complicated, and it doesn't ultimately work out. There's a guy named Louis "Fritz" Fedowitz, who is the most friendly guy on the team, and kind of naïve and unworldly. Helen helps him start a relationship with a prostitute (he has to pay to date her, but she seems to genuinely like him). And there's a guy named Jim Meeks, who doesn't seem to have much in the way of personal plotlines in the first season. In fact, he seems like the most forgettable and unimportant member of the team (a sort of nice-yet-bland Everyman), until the season finale, in which it becomes clear that he's much more important to the plot than he seemed, and will presumably be more interesting in the second season.

Um... man, the season only has 13 episodes, but a lot happens. I've probably already forgotten a great deal of it, and there's probably a lot I wouldn't bother mentioning even if I did remember (whether because it seemed unimportant or because I want to avoid spoilers). But I do need to mention that there is compartmentalization between the different projects, which is strictly enforced by the military. I really don't understand it, but it would practically be seen as treason if one group shared any information with the other. And yet, Charlie eventually realizes there is a fundamental problem with Thin Man, which he doesn't think can be solved. He considers telling Akley about this, but instead he goes to Frank. Frank's team, meanwhile, had been having a nearly insurmountable problem with implosion, but they finally came up with a theory that might make it workable, but they still needed to do a lot of work that was beyond the scope of their small team. So Frank and Charlie break compartmentalization, and begin secretly working together (using the Thin Man team to unwittingly help with their calculations). The only other person who knows about this is Helen. Meanwhile, I must also mention that throughout the season we occasionally see a mysterious man who apparently works for military intelligence, or something. He wasn't even given a name until the season finale, and then only very fleetingly. (Apparently people online had been calling him "Occam," as in Occam's razor, which is how he's listed on IMDb, at least for now.) His real name is apparently Mr. Fisher. Anyway, his job is to root out potential spies within the project, and he has been suspicious of various people. He's a very ominous kind of guy, in a quiet and unassuming way. So I kind of hate and fear him, but he's definitely an intriguing character. And potentially dangerous to people whether they're traitors or not. (I guess what scares me most about him is he's the kind of person whose actions will, several years after the time of this series, become much more common in the era of McCarthyism.)

So, anyway, it's a very dramatic show. We more or less know how history's going to turn out, but even so... the characters don't. So we can definitely appreciate the constant pressure they feel. And of course we don't know how all the personal plotlines are going to turn out. And... there are some big changes by the end of the season, and some cliffhangers, so I look forward to season two. Unfortunately, I don't seem to be able to watch the second season online, as I did with the first season. So I have no idea if or when I'll get a chance to see any more of the series.