TV review: American Rust might be the best thing on television this week

American Rust for pat fitzpatrick

$22,000. That opens the bidding for a house in a rural Pennsylvania town during the first episode of American Rust (Sky Atlantic and Now TV).

Some Irish people saw nothing else after that, because they were on their way to rural Pennsylvania. $22,000 — sure that’s a year’s rent.

I don’t think they’ll like it there. Everyone is on drugs, and not in a good way. We open with the police chief, Del Harris (played by Jeff Daniels) grounding out his meds in a pestle and mortar, very, very slowly.

Then we come across Billy, a 20-something with nothing left to live for, Billy, cracking open a beer on his porch, before his friend Isaac calls over and they go for a walk that ends in an ominous warehouse. This is followed by the three words calculated to put us all on stronger meds — Six Months Earlier.

There should be a law against 'Six Months Earlier'. Flashbacks always look like an after-thought – as if someone says ‘what happened there?’ in a focus group, and now we all have to go back in time.

So American Rust is awful, right? Not really, as it turns out. Billy’s mother, Grace (played by Maura Tierney, or your one, Abby Lockhart, out of ER to a whole generation of telly fans) is the key to it all. She’s having a fling with police chief Del, but, to be honest, he seems more into it than she is. Billy’s father, Virgil, is the most convincing dead-beat Dad I’ve seen on TV in ages. Grace has kicked him out, but you can see that he still knows how to push her buttons in a way that’s well beyond dreary old Del.

Grace eventually ditches Del after he arrests her son (correctly) for assault, and episode one ends with a body in the ominous warehouse that I mentioned earlier. It’s very watchable as long as you’re not looking for high-octane twisty plots that are obviously designed to trick us. I say obviously, because we’ve seen tonnes of these since The Killing got us interested in murder mysteries again, and we can now see the twists coming half an episode away.

American Rust is more about a bunch of people trapped in a miserable town. There is a reason you can buy a house for 22 grand — because no one else wants it.

But Grace brings plenty verve to the table, loving her son, liking Del well enough, but still yearning for the bit of crazy that Virgil brings to her life.

We care enough about Billy to see if he can escape his destiny as a small town drifter and finally make the most of his talent for football.

And we can only hope that we more of the aging judge, who made a very funny joke about man boobs in episode one.

American Rust isn’t the best show on TV this year. But it might be the best thing on TV this week, so give it a look.