American Rust
SKY

American Rust (from 25 October) is the kind of drama which makes reviewers reach in desperation for the adjective “compelling” – because although it takes itself very seriously, it would surely be impossible to call it “enjoyable”.

It’s set in a forgotten nowheresville of a steel town called Buell in Pennsylvania, where a dust-dry wind blows through the empty warehouses and the hulking skeletons of disused machinery. There are boarded-up houses with repossession signs in their front gardens and bars where folk go to drown their sorrows and beat each other up. The chief protagonist, as so often in this sort of drama, is the local police chief (Jeff Daniels). And, as police chiefs in these series so often are, this one is approaching retirement – kindly but jaded, worn out and worn down, and he also has a prescription drug addiction. We’re in Mare of Easttown downbeat, left-behind-America territory, but we’re missing the tenderly drawn characters which made that series, for all its plot clichés, feel (for the most part) believable.