The Brothers Sun Hits the Netflix Sweet Spot, for Good and Ill

At some point—I don’t know when, but I would probably pinpoint it around 2020—Netflix decided in a permanent sense what it wanted its original dramatic programming to be. Their answer was to scale up the watchability, and scale down the ambition. All in all, it reads like a successful blueprint for mass viewing, but a detriment to quality. It’s hard to imagine shows like Orange is the New Black, Mindhunter, Bloodline, Narcos, or even Ozark being greenlit on the current version of the service; things run simpler now, and while this may sound like a broad proclamation, the shows we get now are more in line with The Diplomat or The Lincoln Lawyer or Kaleidoscope—some better than others, all of them easy to consume, but not really striving for greatness.

To this latter group we can now add The Brothers Sun, the black comedy/action thriller that hits the same centers of the brain as all of the above. Here, Justin Chien and Sam Song Li star as Charles and Bruce Sun, both sons of a Taiwanese warlord, but about as different as can be. Charles is the brother who came up in the game, tough and menacing, ready and extremely willing to kill if necessary, while Bruce was the boy who was ushered away to America as a kid, is studying to be a doctor, and loves improv comedy… the kind of kid whose own mother refers to him as “soft” as often as possible. That mother, Eileen Sun, is played by Michelle Yeoh, good as ever, with a kind of steel-will expressed in brutal assessments of her boys, the world, and life itself. The three main characters work well together, and though this is probably the kind of series I won’t feel compelled to finish, due to the utter lack of time, if you twisted my arm and made me finish it, I wouldn’t protest too much.

There are other compliments to be paid here; the fighting is terrific, the cinematography, whether it’s in the shadowy skyscrapers of Taiwan or the sunny climes of southern California, creates the right moods, and though almost every supporting character is played extremely big, they all manage to contribute something.

On the downside, it ends up feeling mostly frivolous. There’s really nothing here; no excellent drama to sink your teeth into, only the most tepid comedic bits you’ve seen a thousand times before, yawn-inducing dialogue, and a plot that wavers between serviceable and nonsensical, but never better. When it comes to dramatic elements that I personally care about, which are variable but can be broadly reduced to “it would be nice to have a good story,” it felt like many other recent Netflix dramas have felt—that, by and large, nobody really gave a shit.

Which brings us back to the age-old debate that seems to come up so much recently: isn’t it okay to just have a show that’s fun, dude?