2022 - 2024
The Old Man ran on FX (streaming next-day on Hulu) across two seasons, with Season 1 airing June to August 2022 and Season 2 arriving September to November 2024 after one of the more dramatic production delays in recent prestige TV history. Seven episodes a season, fourteen total, then cancellation in December 2024. Developed for television by Jonathan E. Steinberg and Robert Levine, adapted from Thomas Perry's 2017 espionage novel of the same name.
The premise is deceptively simple. Dan Chase is a former CIA operative living off-grid in rural upstate New York, an assumed name, two German Shepherds, a grown daughter he barely speaks to, and a past he has spent thirty years running from. When an assassin breaks into his house in the pilot and Chase kills the man in self-defence, the FBI spins up a manhunt. Assistant Director Harold Harper, a senior official with a thirty-year history with Chase, is put in charge. What follows is part thriller, part chamber piece, part slow reckoning with the 1980s Soviet-Afghan War and what the CIA got up to there.
A quick production note that matters for any honest assessment. Filming on Season 1 began in early 2020, paused when Jeff Bridges was diagnosed with lymphoma in October of that year, and paused again when he contracted COVID-19 during treatment. Bridges recovered, went back to work, and Season 1 finally aired in summer 2022. That context is on screen in every frame. The show is a man in his seventies physically carrying a series that asks him to sprint, fight, and bleed, and he does it.
Bridges is the whole engine. He plays Dan Chase as a man who is slower than he used to be and more dangerous than anyone expects, which is the essential trick of the show. At seventy-two, he brings a gravity you cannot manufacture. John Lithgow matches him as Harold Harper, FBI Assistant Director, and the two-hander between them is the reason most people show up. Amy Brenneman, playing landlady Zoe McDonald who rents Chase a room and ends up more entangled than she ever bargained for, turns what could have been a thankless role into the show's emotional heart in Season 1.
Alia Shawkat plays Angela Adams, a senior FBI officer with a direct line to Chase that becomes the spine of both seasons. Navid Negahban is the Afghan warlord Faraz Hamzad, Chase's old adversary and the reason everything is happening. Season 2 deepens the ensemble considerably:
John Lithgow
Harold Harper
Gbenga Akinnagbe
Raymond Waters
Bill Heck
Young Dan Chase
Pej Vahdat
Omar
Jeff Bridges
Dan Chase
Alia Shawkat
Angela Adams / Emily Chase
Navid Negahban
Faraz Hamzad
Hiam Abbass
Older Belour
One detail worth naming. The Afghan material uses actual Afghan and Palestinian actors speaking Dari and Pashto, rather than the usual Hollywood shortcut of any brown actor doing any accent. It shows. The Season 2 flashback episodes are among the most textured depictions of the Soviet-Afghan War that American television has produced.
The manhunt framing is a Trojan horse. What the show is actually about is two old men who have been lying to themselves and each other for thirty years, and the women and children who had to live with the consequences. Chase and Harper are the same man with different uniforms. They love each other, they have betrayed each other, and neither of them is willing to die before the account is settled.
The show's real question is whether a good man who did terrible things for what seemed like good reasons can ever come home.
Underneath that sits a harder question about American intelligence work in the 1980s, which the show does not flinch from. The CIA's Afghan adventure produced a lot of Dan Chases and a lot of collateral damage, and The Americans and Homeland have mined adjacent territory, but this one is quieter and angrier. It blames the institution rather than the foot soldier. That is a more mature take than you usually get.
Family is the other throughline. Chase's relationship with his adopted daughter is the show's warmest thread and its sharpest knife. The question of what a father owes a child when the father's life has been built on lies is one the series picks up and puts down across both seasons without ever quite resolving. I think that is the right choice.
Slow. On purpose. If you need a body every ten minutes this is not your show, and the reviews that called Season 2 "overextended" were reacting to this same quality that made Season 1 compelling. Steinberg and Levine came out of Black Sails, where they learned to let scenes breathe and let characters talk, and they brought that sensibility to FX. Conversations run long. Silences run longer. When the violence arrives it lands hard precisely because the show has refused to cheapen it.
Visually the series favours natural light, muted palettes, and a lot of interiors. Chase's upstate farmhouse, Harper's DC home office, a series of motels and safe houses. Season 2 opens the palette up considerably with the Afghanistan work, which is shot with real dust and real sun and gives the show a scale it never had before. The score is restrained. Use of pop music almost zero. It trusts the faces.
Season 1 landed well. Critics praised Bridges and Lithgow in particular, Rotten Tomatoes sat comfortably in the high 80s, and the show looked like it might be an awards contender. Season 2 drew a cooler reception at 64 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and a Metacritic of 66, with the consensus that the central pair remained watchable but that the overall shape had "lost a step." Ratings dropped. FX cancelled it on 17 December 2024. Two seasons. One finale that wraps most of the threads.
The show's legacy is complicated. It will be remembered less for its plot than for Bridges's late-career performance, for the production story, and for being one of the last examples of a certain kind of adult FX drama before the streaming consolidation narrowed what networks were willing to greenlight. If you liked the workplace spycraft of Slow Horses or the generational espionage of The Americans, this belongs on the same shelf, even if it is quieter than either.
I came to The Old Man expecting another grumpy ex-operative procedural and got something closer to a melancholy King Lear with guns. That is not a small thing. Bridges is doing the best television work of his career here, Lithgow is giving him somewhere to put it, and the writers are smart enough to stay out of the way.
It is not perfect. Season 2 is genuinely too long in places and there are plotlines that never pay off because the cancellation cut the show short of where it was going. But the central relationship is worth the price of admission and the Afghanistan material is worth the show's existence on its own. If you liked the contemplative spy work of Tehran or the patient character writing of Slow Horses, you will find your rhythm here.
Two seasons. One finale. A performance from Jeff Bridges that is genuinely hard to watch in the best possible way, given what the man was going through while making it.
Joel Grey
Morgan Bote
Leem Lubany
Young Belour
Amy Brenneman
Zoe McDonald