Emmy Episodes: Bloodline

It’s always my policy to watch every Emmy-nominated episode each year, which leads me to sample a handful of shows that I don’t tune in to on a regular basis. For the second year in a row, I’m making a special effort to spotlight each of those installments to offer my perspective on shows that I don’t review each week.

Bloodline: Season 3, Episode 9 “Part 32” (C-)

Here’s a great example of an episode not to watch when you aren’t a regular viewer. I watched a few episodes of season one back when it first started then the Emmy submissions for the end of the season and season two when both Kyle Chandler and Ben Mendelsohn were nominated. After winning the supporting actor trophy for his part in flashbacks in season two, Mendelsohn is back again as a nominee in the guest actor race for, again, appearing in flashbacks. This episode was dizzyingly disorienting, and not in a good way. It’s clear that something happened to Chandler’s John, possibly from a drug overdose, possibly from taking Ambien, and possibly from just having endured some trauma related to the death of his brother or something else. He met no less than three different doctors all with the same last name and hallucinated so many things while traveling through his memory banks full of real and imagined events from his past. I’ll be honest – I don’t really know what happened and, based on the pacing and general plotting, I just don’t care. Mendelsohn is and has always been a strong actor, but I’ll take his performance in “Animal Kingdom,” “Mississippi Grind,” or the forthcoming “Una” any day over this mediocre role that he effortlessly pulls off. This show was ended after its third season, allegedly due to entertainment tax incentives being cut in Florida, but I think that this once-promising drama with a great cast never really lived up to its premise and I’m not sad to see that it’s over.