The Comey Rule is a horror show we’re all still living

A splashy new series with a killer cast starts today but you really have to wonder if there’s the appetite to relive the nightmare.

REVIEW

“Are you sure you want to watch this?”

That’s a line said by one character to another halfway through the first episode of The Comey Rule, but it could just as easily work as a question to the audience.

Are you sure you want to watch a dramatisation of events so mentally exhausting and recent it hasn’t yet resolved itself?

With the US election a few weeks away, you could argue that The Comey Rule is a timely miniseries that explores the dynamic between former FBI Director James Comey (Jeff Daniels) and Donald Trump (Brendan Gleeson).

Written and directed by Billy Ray (screenwriter on Richard Jewell, State of Play remake), The Comey Rule is a solid political drama with some great key performances and good pacing, even if it’s prone to over-earnestness or aggrandisement of Comey’s role.

But it also plays like a horror movie in your deepest sleep, except you can’t wake up from it. There is no release, only a gut-churning reminder that it’s a nightmare we’re all still living through.

The Comey Rule doesn’t reveal what you don’t already know Photo Credit: Ben Mark Holzberg/CBS.

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Does that make for an enjoyable three-and-a-half hours, re-treading familiar ground that has splashed around every global news outlet for the past five years? No, not really. Unless you’re a glutton for punishment, in which case, have at it.

Based on Comey’s book, A Higher Loyalty, the story kicks off with the Hillary Clinton email investigation in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election and the blow-out from Comey’s unprecedented choice to publicly announce it had reopened the file 12 days before the election.

That’s the basis of the first episode, which paints Comey as a dedicated public servant compelled by circumstance into a difficult choice. There are plenty of people who will disagree with that interpretation, people who believe Comey’s breach of protocol was tantamount to election interference.

Casting someone with the gravitas of Daniels makes Comey the hero, albeit a flawed one who was perhaps too staunch to what he calls his loyalty to the institution of the FBI, undone by his own lack of political instincts in the face of a president who has no concern for the rule of law.

This guy Photo Credit: Ben Mark Holzberg/CBS.

Where there’s a hero, you need a villain. And Trump makes for the perfect TV villain – a fanciful character whose self-absorption is so outlandish and ludicrous he seems like a person only a Hollywood writer could dream up. That he’s a real person, well, the world is dealing with that right now.

Gleeson’s Trump – whose stream of consciousness verbiage, aggressive sniffing and singular focus on his own victimhood is played with triggering accuracy – only really comes into the series in the second episode.

It’s a highly effective portrayal, and Ray and director of photography Elliot Davis uses the camera to highlight Trump’s rot, from extreme close-ups to angling up on him as he physically intimidates Rod Rosenstein (Scoot McNairy).

It’s also one of the reasons why you may not want to dive into The Comey Rule.

There are many familiar faces playing familiar faces – T.R. Knight as Reince Priebus, Peter Coyote as Robert Mueller, Holly Hunter as Sally Yates, William Sadler as Michael Flynn, Jonathan Banks as James Clapper and Michael Kelly as Andrew McCabe.

The casting mostly works but the most glaring aspect of the collection of these people is that none of them – except for Trump – are still in their roles less than a handful of years later.

Michael Kelly as Andy McCabe in The Comey Rule

There are plenty of reasons not to watch The Comey Rule but are there any reasons to do so, masochism aside?

That’s the question at the heart of the series. Anyone with a passing interest will be familiar with all these story beats, and The Comey Rule doesn’t tell you anything you don’t already know.

We know Trump lies with abandon, we know his administration is dysfunctional and we know he values personal loyalty above the law.

The Comey Rule just does it with a dramatic score and desaturated visuals.

If the global stakes of the upcoming US election still aren’t clear, then perhaps there is one scene that could elucidate things – not that it will do much to sway Trump defenders.

In one sequence in the second episode, where a group of intelligence, military and law enforcement heads are gathered to discuss Russian interference in the 2016 election, one of them asks, “to what end, why would Russia want Trump installed?”.

The answers range from Arctic drilling, Turkish incursion against the Kurds, the end of the Iran nuclear deal and so many more – all things that have come to pass.

But what seems to be Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ultimate aim seems to be to sow discord and hyper-partisanship in the US and to undermine the very foundations and institutions that uphold democracy itself.

What does anyone think is happening in the US right now?

The Comey Rule starts streaming on Stan today, with the second episode available tomorrow