Run

Netflix isn’t the only streaming service cramming its content in; as part of its transition from Now/Go to Max, HBO is also putting out all sorts of streaming content! I watched one of its latest, Run, which is a weird hybrid in a lot of ways.

Ruby and Billy were college sweethearts who made a pact to run away together on a train if they ever got bored with their grown-up lives. Fifteen years after they break up, Billy texts Ruby, and away they go across the USA. Unsurprisingly, time hasn’t stood still, and Ruby (Merritt Wever) is now a wife and mother, while Billy (Domhnall Gleeson, using his native Irish accent) is now a motivational speaker (although this brings up questions—is there a huge market for motivational speakers in Ireland? The United Kingdom? I can’t imagine a British company dragging out Gleeson in a skinny-cut suit to inspire a bunch of sodden middle-managers who just want to drink in a Wetherspoons and be racist, but perhaps I am misunderstanding the culture.)

So Run has a premise, but it doesn’t really have a plot. At first, it’s a romance. The writers seem faintly concerned that the characters are unappealing, especially Ruby, who’s run off on her family (Wever gets a lot of throwaway speeches on feminist issues, to convince us that she is woke to her own circumstances). Personally, I don’t care. I don’t need to watch lovers who are upstanding moral citizens, I just have to be convinced that they’re interested in each other—and I never got that sense about Ruby and Billy. After Ruby confesses to Billy that she lied to him about becoming a star architect—her youthful goal—and that her career actually ended in total humiliation, Billy’s response is to gripe that Ruby didn’t tell him that she had children (although he could have found that out through a simple name search; the show’s technological level wavers between 1999 and the present, depending on the needs of the plot). These are people who were supposedly pining over each other for 15 years; doesn’t Billy care at all about how Ruby feels? Similarly, when Billy confesses his own professional humiliations to Ruby, she has absolutely no reaction, even though it’s been established that she disapproved of his career as a motivational speaker. Is she sympathetic? Pitying? Does she want to tell him that she knows that he’s better than the man he is now? Or does she want to tell him that he got what he deserved? Never mind, these characters don’t interact; they’re more like each others’ masturbatory aids.

Perhaps because the romance isn’t really there, by the fourth episode, Run starts in on the thriller mechanics. There are quarrels over mysterious bags of money, and deaths of secondary characters, and the police get involved. Phoebe Waller-Bridge shows up in a role that seems to exist purely to showcase that Phoebe Waller-Bridge is more charismatic than Gleeson or Wever. (Both Waller-Bridge and Gleeson have romantic arcs with women, but Waller-Bridge is depicted as a competent and caring partner, despite picking up dead animals for a living; by the end of the show, Gleeson’s Billy is a manipulative, drippy mess who needs his girlfriend to clean up his puke. It’s a vibe!) Finally, the train pulls into the station, and the show just ends, with neither Billy or Ruby any different than when they started. If I have to take a guess at what it all means, I think it’s supposed to be some sort of middle-aged bildungsroman, with the put-upon Ruby realizing that she doesn’t need no man and that she needs to take charge of her own life, but it’s such a botch of an ending that it’s not really worth the guess.

One thing I can confidently say about that Run is that it is incredibly short, with under three hours of content in total, counting credits, recaps, and promos for other HBO material. Like Space Force, the issues of how the show got made becomes more interesting than the show itself. What was the creators’ original intent? Did they really think that this story worked in the format in which it’s presented? Perhaps Run was originally meant to be a movie, but the comparative availability of streaming money meant stretching out a two-hour script into seven episodes. Alternatively, Run was greenlit purely on the involvement of Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and the writers then had to scramble to think up the plot. In addition, Run originally aired in weekly installments, but the episodes aren’t all structured with traditional cliffhangers. Was this even ever meant to go on air, or was it originally meant to go direct to streaming? Like Space Force, I suspect this is a makework show—HBO needs material to fill out its catalog, and they’re willing to give money away to anyone with a name. It’s nice that Waller-Bridge and Vicky Jones got their friends paid, but again, someone should remember that ideally there is a viewer involved at the end of this process.

To end on a nice note: Rich Sommer has a small part as Ruby’s rich, doltishly smug husband (he plays in a ukelele band!) and he pulls if off perfectly.