Waco

In every case, the actor elevates the material, raising passable storytelling to a more compelling and charismatic level.

Waco has a clunky couple episodes that fail to really depict the passage of time cleanly and probably will leave many viewers confused as to which agencies are making which blunders, even if they have their initials on their jackets. The third episode gets back into the initial raid in harrowing, well-directed style and it may give me enough momentum to watch the second half of the series, just to see if David Koresh ever does anything wrong.

Only Shannon’s Gary, as a calm-voiced negotiator, seems sensible or particularly intelligent. When you add in Kitsch’s charismatic performance, Waco comes out an oddity: A show that’s more or less on the side of a violent, exploitative cult.

No one is totally innocent in the Waco siege, including many of his followers, but the “Waco” series seems overly eager to vindicate Koresh. And that taints an otherwise well-told story.

It’s in the interactions between the Branch Davidians and the federal government that the Dowdles best capture the sense of an easily avoidable yet nonetheless inevitable catastrophe. Where they struggle is in conveying how it would feel to live a life so tightly entombed in cataclysm that manipulation and abuse become simple facts of life, not dark horrors to overcome.

Waco is a surprisingly pedestrian, paint-by-number docudrama. It’s fine but doesn’t soar like the two installments of FX’s “American Crime Story”: “People v. O.J. Simpson” and “The Assassination of Gianni Versace.”

Skimming the treatment Koresh’s manipulative dark side in Waco, a story that puts the humanity of the Branch Davidians and that of Koresh at its forefront feels ... weird. And this is but one of several niggling oversights in a story that begs for a new consideration.

[Waco] does its best when working on the tension that grows between the Branch Davidians and the ATF. ... With the cliche dialogue and the dead-air drama within the group about David’s power over women played by Riseborough, Benoist and Garner, they struggle to make the series more than a half-intriguing non-fiction spectacle, albeit with Kitsch’s strong performance guiding the way.

Waco is a workmanlike summary of events that paints a largely, some might say excessively, sympathetic portrait of Koresh and his followers. This is likely because of the demands of dramatic compression rather than any propagandizing on the part of the show’s makers.

Despite a partially successful attempt to set the record straight, Waco too rarely offers the kind of depth that would make the examination of these powerful motivations compelling.

Waco won’t be the first drama to reduce a tragedy to its simplest components, but this doesn’t offer much confidence that these are the right components or the only ones. This is Waco in black and white, absent any shades of gray--an inkblot test with just one interpretation.

What Waco needs, and fails to achieve, is a complex, unified theory of Koresh. ... It also largely wastes its incredible cast in the first three episodes made available for review, although Garner shines as Michele, and Benoist imbues Rachel with a steely, sorority-sister kind of authority. The biggest question mark in the series is Kitsch’s Koresh, who remains at a distance from the audience.

As fascinating as Kitsch is to watch as Koresh (and he is truly outstanding), and as stellar as Waco’s entire cast is, there is an uncomfortable feeling of being fed a story that lionizes a cult leader in a way that doesn’t feel like it’s exploring truth so much as providing a particular point of view.