--- title: "Fallen Angels" year: 1993 kind: "series" canonical: "https://film.one/tv/fallen-angels-1993" fi1m_score: 72 critics_reviews: 2 published: "2026-09-20T09:22:55.946233+00:00" updated: "2026-09-20T09:22:56.606159+00:00" region: "US" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Fallen Angels (1993) Created by William Horberg · 30m · Crime, Drama, Mystery **Fi1m score: 72** · Critics: 2 of 6 reviews so far *In a sentence:* Fourteen directors take turns proving they own a hat, and about half of them earn it > A pulp anthology with a different director for every story and a body in each. Half of it is handsome dressing-up; the other half, including Soderbergh’s and Cuarón’s, proves how much a good short story and thirty minutes can hold. ## Synopsis Los Angeles after the war, a city of neon, wet streets and worse people. Each half-hour episode is a self-contained crime story, introduced by the hostess Fay Friendly (Lynette Walden) and taken from the pulp writers who invented the form: Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Jim Thompson, Cornell Woolrich, James Ellroy and Walter Mosley among them. Gary Oldman is Pat Kelley, with Meg Tilly as Lois Weldon. Danny Glover is Chandler’s private detective Marlowe. Gary Busey is Ellroy’s ‘Buzz’ Meeks. Laura Dern is Annie Ainsley, a woman who notices a man who has not noticed her. Six stories air in the first run, nine in the second, each with a different director and a body in the way. ## Review *Fallen Angels* is an American anthology of half-hour crime stories, set in Los Angeles and taken from the pulp writers who gave the genre its furniture: Chandler, Hammett, Thompson, Woolrich, Goodis, Spillane, Ellroy, Mosley. William Horberg created it, and fourteen directors shared the episodes, among them Steven Soderbergh, Alfonso Cuarón, Agnieszka Holland, Peter Bogdanovich, John Dahl and, unexpectedly, Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks and Kiefer Sutherland. Six stories aired from 1 August 1993 and nine more from 8 October 1995. It is a good series, and like every anthology only as good as the episode you land on. The framing has aged worst. Lynette Walden’s Fay Friendly introduces each story in a slinky dress and a slinkier voice, and after three or four the device feels like a joke told by someone already laughing. Past her, the series looks the part. Gary Frutkoff, Rick Heinrichs and Armin Ganz build a Los Angeles of rooming houses, bars with one working bulb and offices where the blinds are always down, and Shay Cunliffe and Katherine Dover put everyone in the right hat. The cinematographers, among them Emmanuel Lubezki, Peter Suschitzky and Declan Quinn, shoot in colour but drain most of it out, so the reds and neon greens land like bruises. Peter Bernstein’s music supplies the late-night brass the genre asks for and knows when to stop. The best episodes understand that these were short stories and behave like them. Soderbergh’s *The Quiet Room* is the one most critics single out, and rightly: it stays in small spaces, keeps its voice down, lets two people be unpleasant to each other without raising a hand, and thirty minutes is exactly the length it needs. Cuarón, working with Lubezki, shoots his story as if nobody had told him it was television. The actors give the thing weight. Gary Oldman plays Pat Kelley with a stillness we do not associate with him, and Meg Tilly’s Lois Weldon is the woman the whole genre was built to be wary of. Danny Glover’s Marlowe is tired in the right way. Gary Busey, as ‘Buzz’ Meeks, is the opposite, and it suits the Ellroy material. Laura Dern is the one who got at us. She plays Annie Ainsley as a woman so used to being overlooked that she seems to apologise for taking up the frame, and it moved us more than a half-hour of pulp has any right to; we had come for the hats and stayed for her face. That is the case for the series in one performance. Give a good actor a short story and a good director and you do not need the second half of a feature. The case against it is the rest. Several episodes, more of them in the second run, treat noir as a dressing-up box: the fedora, the cigarette, the woman in the doorway, the narration that tells us it is raining while we can see that it is raining. The worst offenders are the ones that mistake the voice-over for the point. We were bored by a couple of these, and then irritated, because the same series had shown us how much thirty minutes could hold. The scripts are by capable people, Scott Frank, Howard A. Rodman, Amanda Silver, Donald E. Westlake and Jon Robin Baitz among them, but a Chandler sentence is written to be read and dies a little when spoken over a shot of a car. Against the television anthologies of its era it stands up well. Against the books it cannot, and does not much try. Thompson and Woolrich wrote about people who were frightened all the time, and the series gets that fear onto the screen perhaps one episode in three. The other two are handsome, tidily cut by David Siegel, Stan Salfas and Quincy Z. Gunderson, and gone from the mind before the next one begins. Watch it as it was made, one story at a time, and skip nothing, because the good ones are not where you would expect them. Fifteen half-hours, no two alike, about half worth your evening. For an anthology, that is a good rate. *Fi1m score 72, published 20 September 2026.* ### Reviews we read (2) - **The Independent** (80/100, inferred): The critic finds the series a classy, sharp American noir anthology with strong direction, including by Soderbergh, and calls it a terrific treat despite being scheduled late. Praises the dark material and professional execution. [Read](https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/television-review-5384522.html) - **Variety**, Tony Scott (60/100, inferred): The three episodes are mixed in quality, with one strong, one commercial and one overdone; Soderbergh's 'The Quiet Room' is a good commercial entry with the director keeping a sharp eye on mood and detail. [Read](https://variety.com/1993/film/reviews/television-fallen-angels-parts-i-iii-showtime-suns-july-1-15-29-10-p-m-1200433101/) ## Details - **Created by:** William Horberg - **Creator:** William Horberg - **Director:** Steven Soderbergh, John Dahl, Tom Hanks, Michael Lehmann, Tim Hunter, Jonathan Kaplan, Tom Cruise, Agnieszka Holland, Peter Bogdanovich, Keith Gordon, Phil Joanou, Alfonso Cuarón, Jim McBride, Kiefer Sutherland - **Writer:** Jon Robin Baitz - **Story:** Cornell Woolrich, Raymond Chandler, David Goodis, Dashiell Hammett, Frank E. Smith, Walter Mosley, James Ellroy, Evan Hunter, William Campbell Gault, Bruno Fischer, Mickey Spillane, Jim Thompson - **Teleplay:** Howard A. Rodman, Steven Katz, Jon Robin Baitz, Donald E. Westlake, Don MacPherson, Allan Scott, Richard Wesley, C. Gaby Mitchell, Alan Trustman, David Siegel, Scott Frank, Frank Pugliese, Amanda Silver, Scott McGehee - **Cinematography:** Robert M. Stevens, Robert Brinkmann, Emmanuel Lubezki, Peter Suschitzky, Declan Quinn - **Editor:** Stan Salfas, David Siegel, Quincy Z. Gunderson - **Music:** Peter Bernstein - **Production design:** Rick Heinrichs, Armin Ganz, Gary Frutkoff - **Costume design:** Katherine Dover, Shay Cunliffe - **Producer:** William Horberg, Stuart Cornfeld, Lindsay Doran - **Cast:** Lynette Walden as Fay Friendly - Host; Jennifer Grey as Ginger Allen; William Petersen as Georgie; Edward Bunker as Sailor; Danny Glover as Marlowe; Gary Busey as 'Buzz' Meeks; Gary Oldman as Pat Kelley; Aimee Graham as Gretchen Rae Shoffel - **Runtime:** 30m - **Release (the US):** 1 August 1993 - **Genres:** Crime, Drama, Mystery ## Where to watch in the US Not streaming, renting or buying in the US at the last check. ## If you liked this - *Out of the Past* (1947), Fi1m 89: The template these stories are working from, and still the coldest of them. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/out-of-the-past.md) - *The Long Goodbye* (1973), Fi1m 86: Altman lets Marlowe drift through a Los Angeles that no longer needs him. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/the-long-goodbye.md) - *Devil in a Blue Dress* (1995): Mosley at feature length, with Denzel Washington and a city the genre usually ignored. - *Le Doulos* (1962): Melville does American pulp in French, in raincoats, and nobody can be trusted. - *Inside No. 9* (2014), Fi1m 84: Another half-hour anthology that knows a short story ends before you are ready. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/tv/inside-no-9.md) --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/tv/fallen-angels-1993