Review by C.J. Bunce
Do you want to see the best series opener you’ll probably see this year? If you’re a J.K. Simmons fan–and even if you’re not–set your DVR for tonight’s premiere of Counterpart on Starz. It’s Dirty Harry meets The Adjustment Bureau as J.K. Simmons plays mild-mannered Howard Silk, a thirty-year veteran of a low-level interface job in a Berlin carryover Cold War installation. But his world is turned upside down when he learns an experiment back in the 1980s split time apart and created a duplicate world, and he meets his counterpart–the Howard Silk from the other side, a brusque, 007 spy, who has little patience for his genetically-identical, under-achiever self.
Could Counterpart be J.K. Simmons chance at a coveted television role like Tatiany Maslany’s multiple roles in Orphan Black? We can only hope. His role is similar to Jason Isaacs’s dual role in the 2012 series Awake. But will there only be two Howard Silks, or more? With so many characters in series these days not making it through a single character arc all season, Simmons’ Silk gets plenty of development in his first hour. It’s clear we’re going to get a season of Simmons vs. Simmons, and the series opener allows for audiences to witness plenty of nicely filmed interactions between the two.
It’s exciting, smart, dramatic, and even poignant. Silk’s wife, played by Olivia Williams (The Sixth Sense, The Postman, Rushmore) on this side of the timeline is in a coma, and Silk visits her to read to her each night. He is confronted by her brother, an unlikeable sort played by Jamie Bamber (Battlestar Galactica, Horatio Hornblower). Sara Serraiocco plays a badass counterspy.
Check out this trailer for the series:
