BY JUDY BERMAN
TELEVISION
TOM WOLFE’S A MAN IN FULL IS A MASSIVE BOOK, IN MORE ways than one. The 742-page social novel about a swaggering Atlanta real estate mogul, which took Wolfe over a decade to write, sold a jaw-dropping 1.4 million hardcover copies after its publication in 1998. The book’s themes—money, power, race, masculinity—are just as grand.
So it’s beyond strange that the new Netflix adaptation of A Man in Full feels so slight. The talent involved is hardly minor. The prolific Big Little Lies creator David E. Kelley serves as the miniseries’ writer and showrunner, Regina King directs half the season, and the cast includes Jeff Daniels, Diane Lane, Lucy Liu, and William Jackson Harper. Yet the scant six episodes this team delivers are superficial, disjointed, ultimately pointless. In updating a novel that has aged poorly, Kelley pares back so much context and character development that what’s left never quite coheres.
The series unfolds during the final 10 days in the life of hometown hero Charlie Croker (Daniels). This isn’t a spoiler. The premiere opens with a shot of the real estate titan sprawled out dead. In voice-over, Charlie drawls that he wanted to make his mark on the world: “At the end of the day, a man’s gotta shake his balls.” After celebrating his 60th birthday with a flashy party, he sees his flamboyant ways challenged at an ambush meeting with a bank he owes $800 million. They want their money back, and they’re going to ruin him if they don’t get it. For the banker Raymond Peepgrass (Tom Pelphrey, creepified with Jeffrey Dahmer glasses), this fight is personal; Charlie treats him like a nobody, leading the cartoonishly pathetic Raymond to obsess over taking him down.
There are a few poorly incorporated subplots. Charlie’s lawyer Roger White (Aml Ameen) gets dragged into a scheme to smear a right-wing opponent by his Morehouse classmate, Atlanta Mayor Wes Jordan (Harper). A Black man named Conrad Hensley (Jon Michael Hill), the husb
