If you thought Hugh Laurie (top) couldn’t find a psychologically darker role than Gregory House, you need to catch up with Hulu’s Chance.
The second 10-episode season of Chance rolls out Wednesday on the streaming service, and it keeps getting both more fascinating and more disturbingly intense.
Laurie plays Dr. Eldon Chance, a forensic neuropsychiatrist who works with victims and sometimes perpetrators of trauma.
While he’s good at his job, he’s got some symptoms of burnout, mostly triggered by frustration. There’s so little he feels he can do to right some of the egregious wrongs to which he’s constantly exposed.
A first-season patient, Jaclyn Blackstone (Gretchen Mol), pushed him past the tipping point, for reasons that were a little bit good and a lot dangerous.
It plunged him into a world of corruption, secrets and shadowy, unrevealed motives.
It also drove him into the company of Darius “D” Pringle (Ethan Suplee, left), one of the great underappreciated characters of contemporary television.
D combines the most interesting elements of a genius and a goon, and in the first season he gradually became Chance’s fixer.
That was not good news for Jaclyn’s husband Raymond (Paul Adelstein), a menacing fellow who was becoming increasingly suspicious of Chance’s relationship with his wife and was not averse to violent solutions himself.
The Blackstone connection drove Chance and D closer together, and as Season 2 begins they are almost fused at the hip. It’s become a buddy show in the most twisted sense of the term.
The whole situation is especially volatile because Chance is in the middle of a divorce and he’s trying desperately to maintain a close relationship with his teenage daughter Nicole (Stefania LaVie Owen, right).
You’d think that might be a modifying influence on his increasingly reckless behavior, but in fact at times it almost seems to have the opposite effect.
What drives the early part of Season 2, in any case, is the interplay between D and Chance.
D is the kind of character who commands your attention every time he’s on the screen. He rarely raises his voice, he calculates every move carefully and yet you know he’d have no trouble stuffing a severed head in a bowling bag if that seemed to be the best solution to a problem at hand.
In any other show, he’d be the big bad, the guy everyone desperately scrambled to stop. In Chance, he’s at times closer to an equalizer, the forbidden weapon that sometimes can feel necessary to neutralize really, really bad guys.
Suplee plays him masterfully, while Laurie is terrific as a man trying to navigate a brutal world and still retain some shred of humanity.
Unlike House, Chance doesn’t balance the grim stuff with frequent light interludes or smartly sarcastic wordplay. There are breathers, but Laurie’s doctor this time stands deeper in the quicksand.
Giving us few clues whether he will ever get out.