There’s a lot going on in Class of ’09, a new FX limited series about a group of FBI Academy graduates on divergent paths into a dystopian-ish future. It’s 2034, and the FBI director, Tayo Michaels (Brian Tyree Henry, elder age denoted by graying temples), oversees a vast, nebulous surveillance system indicated by flickering images and constellations of code, tentatively investigated by agents with bionic eyes and holographic screens. Then it’s 2009, when several recruits gather at Quantico for five months of formative training. In the present, the ’09 graduate Ashley Poet (Kate Mara) is an undercover agent tasked with snooping on her classmate Hour’s (Sepideh Moafi) dubiously ethical “criminal database”.
Each are intriguing threads of what could be compelling storylines: an elegiac glimpse of past camaraderie before life got heavy and complicated, a high-concept law enforcement procedural, a sci-fi lite thriller. But Class of ’09, written and created by the British novelist/screenwriter Tom Rob Smith and executive-produced by American Crime Story’s Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson, seems more interested in the tricky arrangement of these threads than actually pursuing them.
I would usually cheer a dramatic series that clocks in around 43 minutes an episode. (Four were provided to critics, of eight total.) But Class of ’09 feels like a show that deserves an hour per chapter, both for its prestige TV ambitions (it looks more refined than most anything on Netflix) and its scope. Each timeline has its own momentum: in the past, development of the ambitious recruits at Quantico; in the present, Tayo’s use of Hour’s surveillance database to investigate domestic terrorists clearly inspired by the Proud Boys and Ammon Bundy; and in the future, Poet’s investigation of just how far Tayo, as director, has taken this thinly sketched AI system in the name of security and fairness. (Henry is typically excellent in a handful of scenes in which Tayo, as the only Black recruit, explains just how fallible and biased American law enforcement can be.)
Braiding the timelines – continuously labeled past, present and future and delineated by hair cut and color – offers a potentially rich setup. In theory, future peril weighs on past decisions. In practice, the different eras act less as a prismatic view of a graduating class than as bumper cars, each jostling and undercutting the other. Surprise confrontations, romantic tension and long-awaited reunions are sapped of their power when we know the outcomes ahead of time. It doesn’t help that the farther into the future we go, the more sterile and one-dimensional the world becomes. Characters talk about technology like AI for dummies; 11 years from now is a vague place where Poet says things like “computer, turn on lights” and calls her Tesla a “classic”.
There are plenty of intriguing ideas carrying the early episodes, such as the moral pretzels one must make in the process of becoming an agent, or how good intentions can corrode into cynicism. It’s just that little of this potential coheres into something actually sinister or suspenseful. It’s unclear what Class of ’09 wants its mystery to be. Is it the ominous “system” that seems like straightforward AI? Is it how Tayo hardened into an ends-justify-the-means director? Is it corruption within the FBI in the past, present and future? Is it what happened between Poet and her former best friend, Hour, or past flame Lennix (Brian J Smith)? None of these feel particularly deep or surprising. And given what we know about television’s role in reinforcing myths of hyper-competency and fairness among law enforcement, the slow reveal that the FBI may not be as fair as its recruits thought it would be – a revelation that appears to have shocked Poet in the past – lands with a thud.
The writing may sputter, particularly as the show bungles the encroaching threat of technology (“You open that box, you’ll never be able to close it,” says one agent of the AI bodycam tech). But it’s at least elevated by Mara’s grounding performance as a cerebral recruit with a savior complex. And Henry, best known for his role as the chagrined rapper Paper Boi on FX’s seminal Atlanta, is batting far above the rest of the field. As in Causeway, the underwritten Jennifer Lawrence comeback vehicle for which he drew a best supporting actor Oscar nomination last year, Henry is masterly at conveying layers, an unseen well of experience and feeling, far beyond what’s on the page. Every scene he’s in offers a glimpse of a better, more robust show and story.
At one point in the present, Poet holds an old photo of her graduating class. They’re huddled around chairs at a dive bar, fresh-faced and recognizably late aughts, brimming with potential. It’s an artifact of different people that evokes, for a second, the vortex of choices, of wondering what could have been. I found myself wishing we could stay with them – skip the hopping around, burrow into what changed, having picked a lane and stuck with it. Class of ’09 has ambition but, like many a starry-eyed freshman, spreads itself too thin.
Class of ’09 starts on FX and Hulu on 10 May and in the UK at a later date
