Manhattan

Last night, after some very late spreadsheeting, I attempted to watch Manhattan – a new (for me) mini-series about the Manhattan Project in WW2 (the one where they build the atomic bomb somewhere in New Mexico).

It’s unwatchable.

The basic theme is that there are competing teams and the one that we are supposed to sympathise with is a bunch of outsiders with less support from the army but better ideas.

Their journey is dark but I am sure they will succeed and 12 episodes later they will be responsible for Hiroshima. I will not find out.

On top of that there is a veneer of moralising about the dangers of building an atomic bomb. All the married couples have issues. There is the odd spy. You get the idea.

And the rest is just the usual soap opera of sex in the desert.

It’s not terrible. The actors are good, The set is fantastic. The make-up is at the top of it’s game.

It’s the writers that fail. Miserably. 

In reality a bunch of physicists and engineers, in the desert or anywhere else, isn’t much to work with, no matter what they are building. They aren’t the most interesting characters in my experience, the physicists (who take centre stage). And in real life their wives are nowhere as good looking as in the show. 

They should have done this show around the SBR Program which was as big as the Manhattan Project in WW2. They spent (in today’s terms) over $100B on this program and figured out how to make the first synthetic rubber, primarily to be used in car and truck tyres.

There was no moral dilemma to deal with and most importantly the people were all chemists – far more interesting.