2018 - 2018
Waco is a six-episode limited series that premiered on Paramount Network on 24 January 2018 and finished on 28 February 2018. It was the cable channel's flagship scripted launch, arriving before Yellowstone gave the network its franchise identity, and it went big right out of the gate. The Dowdle brothers, John Erick and Drew, created it together after a run in horror (Quarantine, As Above So Below), and the tonal pivot to dramatised real history is the first surprising thing about the show.
The subject is the 51-day standoff at the Mount Carmel compound outside Waco, Texas, from February through April 1993. ATF agents tried to serve warrants on Branch Davidian leader David Koresh on 28 February. The raid went wrong. Four ATF agents died. Six Davidians died. The FBI arrived and laid siege. On 19 April, a fire consumed the compound and 76 Branch Davidians were killed, 25 of them children.
What Waco does, and what makes it unusual, is refuse to pick a side. It is adapted from two memoirs written from opposite ends of the barricade: FBI negotiator Gary Noesner's Stalling for Time and Branch Davidian survivor David Thibodeau's A Place Called Waco. The Dowdles stitched both perspectives into the same script. You get the federal control room and the chapel. The sniper scope and the hymn. It is a formal balancing act, and it mostly works.
Taylor Kitsch has the role of his career as David Koresh. This is not an exaggeration. After Friday Night Lights and the John Carter fallout, Kitsch needed a part that reminded people what he could do, and he found it here. The physical transformation is obvious, the accent is tight, and the musical performances are Kitsch playing and singing live. Koresh fronted a band, recorded an album, and considered himself a rock star before he considered himself a prophet. Kitsch catches that strange braid of charm, conviction, and menace.
Michael Shannon is the counterweight as Gary Noesner, the FBI's chief hostage negotiator. He is the voice-of-reason character, which in a Shannon role translates to a man speaking quietly while watching decisions go very wrong in slow motion. The series gives him the through-line of a good federal agent sidelined by his own Hostage Rescue Team. If you have watched him in Boardwalk Empire, you know the register. Here he is less predatory, more exhausted.
Around the two leads:
Julia Garner
Michelle Jones
Melissa Benoist
Rachel Jones
Paul Sparks
Chuck Sarabyn
Andrea Riseborough
Judy Schneider
Taylor Kitsch
David Koresh
Rory Culkin
David Thibodeau
John Leguizamo
Jacob Vazquez
Shea Whigham
Mitch Decker
It is a stacked call sheet. Paramount spent the money.
On its surface Waco is a procedural about a federal siege. Underneath it is a story about institutional memory, or the lack of it. The FBI that rolls up to Mount Carmel in 1993 is still bruised from Ruby Ridge eight months earlier. Noesner knows what a botched standoff looks like because he just watched one. The Hostage Rescue Team knows too, and draws the opposite lesson. The series is fundamentally about two federal philosophies, negotiation versus tactical dominance, fighting inside the same agency while people are trapped inside a building.
It is also a study of religious authority inside a closed system. Koresh was a charismatic leader with scripture in one hand and a guitar in the other. The show takes seriously that the people inside Mount Carmel believed something, without pretending their belief made them safe from him. Koresh's sexual abuse of minors is a matter of public record. Waco does not dramatise it gratuitously and it does not hide it. That balance, showing the community's faith as real while refusing to sanitise its leader, is the hardest thing the show attempts.
The result is something closer to moral ambiguity than an actual take. Neither side comes out clean. The federal escalation was catastrophic. The man in the compound was a predator. Both of those statements live in the same frame.
The Dowdles film the compound as a fragile thing. Wide shots of the Texas scrubland, close handheld inside the chapel, natural light through the windows. When the ATF arrives the camera grammar switches to procedural tension, radios and tactical stacks and the cold vocabulary of a warrant service. The sound design is particular. Silence stretches. Koresh's guitar and Thibodeau's drums do a lot of emotional work. When the Bradley tanks show up in later episodes, the sound gets lower and heavier, and you can feel the siege thicken.
It is a handsomely made show. The production design of Mount Carmel is patient, almost intimate. You understand the space before anything happens inside it, which means you feel it when the space starts to close in.
Waco was the most successful Paramount Network launch to date when it aired. Critics were divided: some reviewers praised Kitsch and Shannon without reservation while finding the balance between the two sides a little too neat, others argued that moral symmetry was the point and that both Noesner and Thibodeau had a right to be centred in their own story. Taylor Kitsch pulled the strongest notices of his career.
A follow-up series, Waco: The Aftermath, aired on Showtime in 2023 with Michael Shannon reprising Noesner. It is a separate production covering the trials and the militia context that flowed out of the siege. The 2018 series is the one to start with.
Culturally the show landed in a moment when federal overreach was back in the national conversation, and it has aged into something with more weight than its original reviews suggested. If the ATF raid of 28 February 1993 and the fire of 19 April 1993 are now shorthand for state tactical failure, Waco did a lot of the work of refreshing that memory for a generation that was not around for the original footage.
I went in expecting another cable dramatisation of a known tragedy and came out with a better grasp of the actual events than I had from decades of news clips. The writing refuses the two easiest shapes, neither a federal hagiography nor a cult-apology piece, and holds its line for six hours. Kitsch commits to a role that would embarrass a lesser actor. Shannon does what Shannon does, which is to make a quiet man the loudest thing in a scene.
If you liked Chernobyl for the way it indicts institutional failure without screaming, you will find the same discipline here. If you liked Mindhunter for the federal-agent-thinking-out-loud register, Noesner's arc scratches that itch. And if Boardwalk Empire is the Michael Shannon you know, think of this as the Michael Shannon you should get to know next.
Six episodes. No filler. Worth the evening.
Michael Shannon
Gary Noesner
Camryn Manheim
Davidian Elder