Nothing’s better for a TV critic than falling in love with a show that didn’t sound like much on paper. Cinemax’s lean and mean eight-episode fall drama Quarry, based on Max Allan Collins’s crime novels, is about Mac Conway (Logan Marshall-Green), a marine who comes home to Memphis from Vietnam in 1972 and finds no openings for a vet of an unpopular war. He reluctantly becomes a hired gun for a crime boss who calls himself The Broker (Peter Mullan).
See? Describing Quarry makes it sound like one more cable drama about a difficult man drawn into a world of murderous people. Created and written by Michael D. Fuller and Graham Gordy, Quarry instead comes to life as soon as you turn it on, with a heartbreaking sense of soul, an ear for dialogue and supporting players who lend the show an impressive degree of grit, gallows humor and suspense.
Marshall-Green delivers a superb performance as the emotionally and mentally wounded Mac; he is matched by Jodi Balfour, who plays his wife, Joni.