‘Here and Now’ Has Plenty of Opportunities to Be Great, But Rather Swing the Hammer

It always cracks me up now when I see Alan Ball’s name mentioned and it’s immediately followed by crediting him as the producer of True Blood. While factually correct, Alan Ball made his bones with two much more critically-acclaimed features: Six Feet Under, one of the golden age HBO shows, and of course, American Beauty. The latter won him an Oscar for its screenplay. It’s important to remember this when judging Here and Now. The supernatural that exists to some degree in all his features is present, but this one lacks the fun of a True Blood. And I know the comparison isn’t apples to apples of course, as True Blood began as campy and got exponentially campier. But it at least it seemed like there a was a good time to be had. Here and Now is pretty self-serious and self-affirming (to someone at least) as it attempts to portray the most real universe that Ball has created thus far. Here and Now is a new HBO series that focuses on a couple of different families. The primary stories mostly run through a multi-racial family through means of adoption. The parents (played by Tim Robbins and Holly Hunter) have four children in total. The parents being white of course have three adopted children from Somalia, Vietnam and Colombia. Their lone biological child is the youngest. They pride themselves on being liberal and worldly, but the chips of that facade fall more and more with each episode. It’s not that they are secretly racist, but they think they know more and empathize with mor…