Little America

We recommend Little America, a warm, attentive anthology with an occasional weakness for telling us things will be all right. Created by Lee Eisenberg, it gives immigrant lives room for work, family friction and humour without treating every character as a representative case. Its strongest stories make us interested in what someone is doing before asking what that person might mean to America. The motel-manager opening establishes that approach, and the series is usually wise enough to keep its attention on individual lives.

Kabir, played by Suraj Sharma, gives that opening an immediate practical concern: a motel to run. We were moved by his story because the responsibilities of the business make his difficulties feel like someone’s daily life. There is a danger in this material of admiring a person’s persistence so insistently that we stop noticing the person. The episode largely avoids it, although its eagerness to offer encouragement is an early warning of a habit that will recur.

Deepa Mehta’s direction of The Manager helps: the transitions keep the story moving without making each change feel like another lesson. The photography across the series, with Jonathan Furmanski and Paula Huidobro among the cinematographers, gives the performers welcome attention. That intimacy matters when a story has limited time to establish a life and make its pressures felt. The visual approach supports the acting without making these ordinary experiences seem small.

The editing team includes Hilda Rasula and Janet Weinberg, and the short-story format is generally handled with assurance. The episodes make room for humour alongside hardship without an awkward pause to explain the change. The second season’s attention to immigrant family relationships is particularly rewarding in this respect. We can recognise affection and frustration together, and the performances allow both feelings to exist without insisting that one must win the scene.

The weakness is that some instalments seem anxious about leaving us discouraged. Individual determination can start to look like an adequate answer to problems the stories themselves suggest are much larger. We do not need every episode to become a discussion of policy, but the preference for personal progress sometimes makes the obstacles feel easier to overcome than they should. Lee Eisenberg’s series is most persuasive when it lets a difficult experience remain difficult; the extra reassurance is sometimes intrusive.

Within television’s anthology format, the achievement is how readily these separate lives hold our attention without a continuing plot to pull us into the next episode. The first season and the second each contain eight episodes, giving the programme space to change its emphasis while keeping a recognisable warmth. There are variations in force and subtlety, but little sense of an episode existing merely to fill its allotted space. Even when the optimism is overdone, the interest in how people manage their lives feels sincere.

This is good company for an evening when patience with other people is in short supply. The comedy helps, and the tenderness is usually earned before the programme asks us to notice it. Try an episode at a time, and allow the people to linger before the next story arrives.