How Far Will You Follow Julia Garner Into The Altruists?
Falling for Julia Garner's Caroline Ellison could be the uncomfortable part of The Altruists. The eight-episode Netflix drama arrives November 19, with Anthony Boyle as Sam Bankman-Fried. Its creator and co-showrunner, Graham Moore, wants us to consider something harder to dismiss than a pair of obvious villains: two people who believed they were doing good while talking themselves into terrible crimes.
That is Moore's reading of their motives. He put it plainly in his Tudum interview:
The series has to earn that interpretation. A character's belief in their own decency can make a crime story frightening: there is always one more exception to make, one more lie that will supposedly fix everything. Moore describes just such a progression of increasingly large lies.
We would watch that drama. We would lose patience with one that expects a tender scene between its leads to settle the question of who got hurt. Understanding somebody should make their choices more troubling, because you can see where they might have stopped. If the romance makes those choices seem inevitable, it has given them too easy a way out.
Moore also says he wanted Garner and Boyle to create characters rather than impressions. That is encouraging. A familiar voice might sell a trailer; eight episodes need people whose reasoning you can follow even when you want to interrupt it. The danger is becoming so absorbed in the couple that everybody outside their relationship starts to look expendable.
Until November 19, The Outfit is our pick from Moore's earlier work. Try that if the crime story is the draw, or The Imitation Game if you prefer a historical drama.
Then give The Altruists an episode. Watch who gets enough time on screen to become a person, and who exists only as a problem for the couple. That is where a drama like this earns your trust or loses it.
