Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full is a massive book, in more ways than one. The 742-page social novel about a swaggering Atlanta real estate mogul, which took Wolfe over a decade to write, sold a jaw-dropping 1.4 million hardcover copies after its publication in 1998. The book’s themes—money, power, race, masculinity—are just as grand.
So it’s feels so slight. The talent involved is hardly minor. The prolific creator David E. Kelley serves as the miniseries’ writer and showrunner, Regina King directs half the season, and the cast includes Jeff Daniels, Diane Lane, Lucy Liu, and William Jackson Harper. Yet the scant six episodes this team delivers are superficial, disjointed, ultimately pointless. In updating a novel that has aged poorly, Kelley pares back so much context and character development that what’s left never quite coheres.
