Review: ‘The Purge,’ Tamed for Television

The first three films in the “Purge” series were (A) crude but effective exploitation flicks with a sociological veneer or (B) eerily prescient forecasts of the rise of white nationalism and the degeneration of U.S. politics.

The answer is A, entirely, and also B to a greater extent than their writer and director, James DeMonaco, has been given credit for. His vision of a retro-religious party gaining power behind the slogan “a nation reborn” and instituting an annual 12-hour free-for-all called the Purge — as a relief valve, and to cull the underclass — didn’t exactly come true in the 2016 election. But it didn’t exactly not come true.

Like a lot of people in Hollywood, though, DeMonaco had a failure of imagination when it really counted. In “Election Year,” released in July 2016, a liberal female presidential candidate escapes assassination in the Purge and wins the election. A few months later, real life wrote a different ending. DeMonaco hadn’t had the courage of his dystopian convictions.

That might have been a good place to end the “Purge” story, but successful screen franchises can’t be derailed as easily as political careers. A prequel film came out this summer, and on Tuesday the USA cable channel begins a television installment, simply called “The Purge,” with DeMonaco as an executive producer and writer of the first episode. (It’s being called a 10-episode “event,” leaving open the question of whether it’s intended as a miniseries.)

Rather than following up on “Election Year” and further exploring the political and cultural dimensions of its premise, the TV show is set in an indeterminate earlier period that appears to be about 20 years into the reign of the New Founding Fathers of America. And in the first three episodes, following the dictates of basic cable, it dials back both the social commentary and the splatter-happy action and violence from their cinematic levels.

As in the films, the story begins shortly before an annual Purge, as we meet an assortment of people who for one reason or another are still running around outside, or intentionally venturing out, while the minutes tick down. (Many questions go unanswered in this franchise, like why everyone doesn’t just go to Canada or Mexico for the night.)

From that familiar starting point, though, DeMonaco and his colleagues have had to recalibrate the structure, to stretch his single-night premise (assuming that the TV show conforms to it) over 10 episodes. Where the films were blunt, compact delivery systems for standard action-horror situations — a family defending its home, a band of strangers joining to survive a journey — TV has different requirements.

So now there are back stories, which means frequent flashbacks, and subplots that are elaborated as separate little morality tales. An executive (Amanda Warren) and her team have to ride out the night at the office to close a big deal. An anti-Purge couple (Colin Woodell and Hannah Anderson) attend a pro-Purge party. An ex-Marine (Gabriel Chavarria) searches for his sister (Jessica Garza), who’s joined a quasi-religious sacrificial cult. That’s a lot of story, and in the early going the competent presentation (the pilot was directed by Anthony Hemingway) doesn’t mask the pedestrian plotting and canned characters. The films had a simple but effective structure — about half setup and half exploitation blowout — that can’t be effectively recreated on TV. However the series is paced, the surreal imagery and moments of dark humor that enlivened the films will be further apart. (There are still good jokes here and there. Ride-sharing is more expensive because of Purge surge fares.)

Sticking close to role models like John Carpenter and Walter Hill in the “Purge” films, DeMonaco achieved a balance of cleverness and over-the-top violence in sub-two-hour packages. It’s a tougher trick to pull off over the course of a TV series — AMC’s “Preacher” gets it right, but there aren’t many other examples. (The most critically lauded current presentation of similar material in series form, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” succeeds by dint of extreme seriousness.) It remains to be seen whether DeMonaco and the series’ other producers have more up their sleeves.

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‘The Purge’

Tuesday on USA