Manhattan

Season two adds David Harbour as Occam and Richard Schiff in a recurring role, plus guest appearances from William Petersen and Mamie Gummer. Brosnahan and Herbers are both worth flagging. Neither was yet the household name they would become, and both are already doing the work you expect from the actresses they turned into.

🎨 Style and Atmosphere

Manhattan is a beautiful show, shot largely on location near Santa Fe, New Mexico. The cinematography leans into the bleached desert light and the long horizons, with the prefab plywood buildings of a town thrown up in months filling the middle ground. Interiors are close, cramped, honey-coloured. Every lab has that 1940s look that reminds you how much of the world's destruction got invented on chalk-dusted chalkboards by men in rumpled shirts.

The score is sparse and uneasy, with long stretches of near silence. Episodes open cold and take their time. The pacing is closer to a John le Carré adaptation than a network thriller, which is a feature, not a flaw, but it is why some viewers bounced off the pilot. Stick with it. It pays back.

A line that stayed with me from a Sam Shaw interview around the time of the first season:

The show is about two eras. The era of building the bomb. And every era that has come after.

That thesis is baked into the writing. Every conversation about the weapon is also a conversation about what happens when you hand that weapon over to politicians, generals, and a future the scientists cannot control.

📈 Reception and Legacy

Critics loved it. Rotten Tomatoes put season one at 90 percent and season two at 93 percent, with reviewers calling out the writing and the ensemble. Metacritic landed season two at 80. Audiences, unfortunately, did not show up in the numbers WGN America needed. Manhattan became the first original series the network ever cancelled, which at the time felt like a turning of a page. The show was prestige cable without a prestige cable audience.

The cancellation hurt. Shaw had mapped a longer arc, a planned descent into the post-Hiroshima reckoning that the two aired seasons only glimpse. What we got still works as a self-contained story. Season two brings the project to its natural climax with enough emotional groundwork laid that you feel the weight of what is coming even though the show does not take you past it.

Then in 2023 Christopher Nolan released Oppenheimer and suddenly the same history was the biggest film of the year. A lot of us who had watched Manhattan in 2015 sat through Nolan's three hours thinking about how much of this ground Sam Shaw had already covered on a fraction of the budget, and how a show cancelled for low ratings now looks like a cultural document ahead of its time. Oppenheimer is the better film. Manhattan is the deeper character study of the people around the edges of that same story.

🏆 Why It Works

Because it takes the science seriously and the people seriously at the same time, which is harder than it sounds. Because it trusts the audience to sit with a moral question that has no clean answer. Because Hickey and Williams are doing their best work on a show almost nobody watched. Because it gives you Katja Herbers and Rachel Brosnahan before the industry had caught up with either of them.

And because it ends too soon, and even that feels right for a show about a project nobody in 1943 knew how to finish. If the adult-drama pacing of Mad Men worked for you, try this. The moral weight of Chernobyl is here too. So is the science-history patience of For All Mankind. Manhattan sits comfortably alongside all three.

William Petersen

Colonel Emmett Darrow