Friday, May 16, 2014

Lilyhammer - Netflix Series Review



          If there was a TV series where you could say Tony Soprano goes to Norway, this may be the one.  The difference here is that Steve Van Zant is playing the mobster Frank Tagliano.   

           In Lilyhammer, Tagliano goes into witness protection in this series because he’s giving the Feds information on a mobster he was close with.   Given his choice of where to live, Tagliano decides that he wants to live in Norway of all places.  

           I have to say that Tagliano’s performance is great and it’s so hard for me to believe that he was once a member of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street band.   I can still picture him on stage at a concert and see how he had really pulled this role off so well. 

           The culture shock is fun to watch as well when Frank finds out that’s illegal to kill Coyotes even though there is a Coyote out there killing animals.  Of course, Frank has a way to solve this problem just like Tony Soprano would.   The shows builds nicely on more culture shocks throughout the show.  

            The series is full of action with some great comedy blended in throughout the show.  Let’s face it, Tagliano is not working with experienced hit men anymore and all you can say is that many of his cohorts are goofy to say the least, making the show hilarious at times like in one episode when they total a Porsche after taking them out for a test drive. 

            The show reached some high levels of tension, especially when the mobsters that Frank testified against the mobsters, it lead to even more problems for Frank.  If that wasn’t enough, more aggravation was coming when the owner of the Porsche is the brother of another group of mobsters. 

             If there was one problem I had with the show, it was with the other characters that worked with Frank.   As I said before, many of them seemed goofy and there were times when I thought that they brought laughs to the show but there were other times when I thought that the jokes feel flat.  

              Somehow, Frank will find a way to prevail and meet the challenges that are thrown at him, making the show even more exciting and unpredictable.  Lilyhammer is a great series on Netflix and I’ll give it four stars.  

Ron Hummer

           

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