Tee Vee Casualty: Animal Kingdom’s Beautifully Crafted Heartlessness

Netflix reintroduces TNT series, offering nihilism and calling it realism. But it’s just well-crafted cruelty porn.

Here’s the story of a woman named “Cody,” who was raising five boys to lie, cheat, steal and kill…. (📸Pic courtesy of Netflix)

A Black Hole In A Hoodie

Netflix appears to be positioning itself as the WTBS/WGN of streamers these days, the new Superstation. It syndicates cultural corrosion and accidental masterpieces alike, turning mid-tier cable shows into watercooler obsessions after they’ve already been buried. As with those two cable channels in the day, you might get I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners, with gratitude. But they’d also rerun Saved By The Bell so relentlessly, a generation thought it was part of the national curriculum. And let’s face it: This wasn’t Shakespeare for latchkey kids.

But that’s what constant repetition does. It doesn’t elevate quality. It tricks memory. It rewires nostalgia into authority. They didn’t just syndicate content. They rewrote the canon by accident. WGN made Mama’s Family feel like a goddamn cultural pillar. And Netflix? It’s doing the same thing with shows like Animal Kingdom.

I just finished bingeing Kingdom, based on the 2010 Oscar-nominated Australian film, whose entire six season run freshly dropped on Netflix three weeks ago. I still feel like I need to scrub my skin raw with lye soap and steel wool. That finale? Quite possibly the most nihilistic 45 minutes of television ever filmed. No closure, no catharsis, just blood, cold choices, and the most brutal version of “family loyalty” eating itself alive. It wasn’t even tragedy. It was just… void. Cold. A final “fuck you” wrapped in firelight and silence.

And yet… I loved it. Which says something uncomfortable about me, probably.

From the start, the show tells you exactly what kind of world you’re in. First scene: Josh “J” Cody (Finn Cole) sits next to his mother’s corpse after she’s overdosed. Calm. Emotionless. Like he’s reporting a power outage. He tells the cops she’s dead with the same energy you’d use to say you're out of Raisin Bran. That moment isn’t edgy—it’s revealing. This is what they’re calling a protagonist. Not a blank slate. A black hole in a hoodie.

That was the blueprint. And the show never deviated.

The real problem isn’t that Animal Kingdom is dark. Darkness can be art. The problem is that it pretends this dark strain is profound, when it’s really just the aesthetic of meaninglessness. It postures like Breaking Bad or Sons of Anarchy, but misses the soul those shows held onto. They had violence and tragedy, sure. But they also had moments of tenderness, humanity, and regret. Animal Kingdom has none of that. It’s the Trump version of prestige TV: all power, no soul. All conquest, no consequence. Where empathy is weakness, and the smartest bastard wins.

The show is brilliantly cast, gorgeously shot, and masterfully scored. But it’s built on rot. And people are gonna watch this, in its Netflix revitalization, and think they’re watching the second coming of The Sopranos. It is not.

Julia Cody Breaks My Fucking Heart

Let’s talk about that cast, though. Shawn Hatosy? Give that man a medal. His Andrew Cody, AKA “Pope,” is terrifying and tender, monstrous and broken. He bleeds through the screen. Leila George, as young Janine “Smurf” Cody, channels every ounce of Ellen Barkin’s venom with just enough Exene and Chrissie Hynde to make you look twice. And Barkin herself, as the elderly Smurf? She’s fucking nuclear. Even at 71, she stalks every scene like gravity bends around her. No softening, just raw charisma sharpened with age. She doesn’t ask you to love her. She dares you to try.

And that’s the thing: these actors delivered complexity the scripts refused to write. The direction let scenes breathe, trusted silence, let tension implode in real time. There’s genuine craftsmanship here. The machine just didn’t know what to do with it.

Because underneath it all? There’s no story. Just patterns. Blood. Betrayal. Money. Legacy. Load, fire, reload. And any time someone even flirts with escaping that cycle—Julia Cody, youngest brother Deran, even middle brother Curtis’ infant son Nick in his own way—they’re punished for it. Or erased.

And J’s mother Julia, portrayed as a teen by Jasper Polish, breaks my fucking heart.

She was the one spark of real humanity the show ever gave us. Smart, skeptical, wounded, and still trying. But they never let her breathe. She’s exiled, humiliated, crushed by addiction and circumstance, then buried, not just literally, but narratively. She’s emotional fuel for the men around her, especially her twin brother Pope. Her pain is never hers. It’s just the backdrop for his spiral.

And when she’s gone? The show doesn’t mourn her. It uses her. As backstory. As ghost. As myth. As collateral damage for the rancid, fucked-up “family values” Smurf has developed. But not as a person. Not as someone worth saving.

That’s where I lost patience. Because you could see the story that could’ve been told: Julia trying to survive, trying to mother, trying to claw her way out of the wreckage Smurf built. But the show wasn’t interested. They couldn’t even give her a quiet ending. They gave her an obituary written by men who never understood her.

I loved her. Still do. I’d have tried to save her, even if it wrecked me in the process.

And maybe that’s what hurts most: seeing someone like Julia, who still had light, get crushed because she didn’t play the game. Because she didn’t become a weapon. Because she wanted out.

Survival as Reward, Soundtrack-As-Greek-Chorus

Meanwhile, J wins. By becoming colder than the rest. It’s intimated that he watches Pope die in a fire—doesn’t flinch, doesn’t mourn. But plot twist: he wasn’t even there. He was already on a plane to the Virgin Islands. Living off blood money. No reckoning. No arc. No soul. Just survival, rewarded.

Deran (Jake Weary), to his credit, survives too. He has the most complex character arc of anyone on the series. Ben Robson’s Craig is basically big, dumb, party animal muscle. He’s a surfer with a deathwish, snorting his crime earnings and fucking anything that moves. But Deran shows surprising depth: eventually comes out of the closet, though he eventually ships off his pro surfer boyfriend Adrian Dolan (Spencer Treat Clark) to Indonesia after finding out he’d been coerced into informing for the DEA, on the verge of a 15 year prison sentence. Deran even opens an oceanfront bar, trying to keep it clean. Only it ends up a laundromat for the Cody family’s blood money.

The other seeming early outpost of humanity and heart in the show, Baz (portrayed by Scott Speedman), displays sympathy for J versus his asshole uncles menacing and mistrusting him. Then we see later in Season One that his attempted coup over Smurf’s dominion would fuck everyone else over, making his execution in the season finale as he and his girlfriend attempt to flee the country with the family fortune feel justified. We discover what a truly selfish, shallow prick he was—manipulating Pope, Julia, and most anyone in his path—as he’s portrayed as a teen by Darren Mann in flashbacks the last few seasons, and in a return cameo by Speedman depicting the bank robbery that sent Pope to prison.

Speedman’s Baz was all cool exterior and calculated detachment, with that “adopted son with secrets” edge always just beneath the surface. Mann’s teenage Baz totally nailed that adolescent mix of cocky and wounded, like he wanted out but didn’t know how to run. Two shadows of the same boy—one already broken, the other not yet cracked. That show really knew how to haunt backwards.

But that final episode? Deran carries Craig down the beach as he dies, promising to raise his son Nick, take care of girlfriend Renn (Christina Ochoa). It’s the one real act of love in the entire series. And the show cuts to the supremely scorched-earth epilogue immediately after. No resolution, no follow-through. Just fire, an absence of karma for what turns out to be the worst character of the bunch, and silence.

It’s not tragedy. It’s cowardice. These writers didn’t end the story. They fled from it.

Even the brilliant score starts to feel like misdirection. Because the music is too good. Punk anthems in the ‘80s scenes from X, The Clash, The Pretenders. Then gritty ‘90s alt-rock: Nirvana’s “Breed” plays during a flashback robbery, the soundtracked truth the writers room simply could not get on a page:

We could plant a house / we could build a tree...

That's Smurf in a nutshell – her perverse take on the American Dream. She didn’t raise children. She built soldiers for her criminal empire, inside a twisted take on The Brady Bunch. She didn’t want a family. She wanted control, and she got it, even through the intimation of incest that’s the most sickening undercurrent through the whole show. She used whatever she had at hand to manipulate and will the family fortune to life, and preserve it.

A Sermon On Power

However, she didn’t get me.

For all her power and allure, Smurf’s not the one I’d fall for. That would have been Julia, every time. She was the one who still had a soul. And I love broken souls. Not to fix them. Just to give them a place to breathe.

Because Animal Kingdom wasn’t a story. It was a sermon on power. It wanted to say something about loyalty, about family. But what it said was this:

“If you love, you lose. If you feel, you die. If you scheme, you win.”

It’s a mirror of a world we’re still crawling through: no redemption, no grace, just dominance. The sorta world where the Big Beautiful Bill passes, and the elected criminals who do so feel no remorse for the wreckage they’ve just enabled. No accountability. No aftermath. Just an ocean of contamination. And the worst part? People think that’s profound.

It’s not.

You can show darkness without glorifying it. You can write tragedy without erasing the human in the wreckage. You can let your characters fail without treating hope like a punchline.

Breaking Bad did it. So did Sons of Anarchy. Hell, even The Wire, for all its despair, never mocked you for caring. Animal Kingdom does. It looks you in the eye, dares you to believe in someone like Julia, and then spits in your face for trying.

Maybe that’s why it lingers. Why I might watch it again, even knowing it’ll hollow me out. Because it’s expertly made. Because the performances are magnetic. Because the pain feels real. Because there’s still a part of me searching those scenes for something the show refused to give: meaning.

But the truth is… if I want that?

I’ll write it myself.

If This One Hit You, Help Keep It Going

Writing this one wasn’t easy. Not because I didn’t have the words—but because this kind of piece, the raw ones, the personal ones—they take a little more out of me. And lately, I’ve been wondering how much longer I can keep pouring that out without something coming back.

The views on this Substack are still decent—but the growth has slowed. Part Four of the Johansen memorial? No new subscribers. Not even free ones. Which tells me something: I’m not reaching new ears. I’m playing mostly to the choir.

And don’t get me wrong—I love this choir. This Substack has kept me going in more ways than I can say. But if this is going to keep growing, if I’m going to keep telling the stories nobody else tells, then I need more than just loyalty. I need backing.

So if this Animal Kingdom piece got under your skin…
If it said something you’ve felt but never seen in words…
If you nodded, or winced, or saw yourself in it—

Then help me keep going.

Become a paid subscriber. Upgrade if you’re already here for free. Or just share it with someone who needs to read it.

Because I’m not doing this to get rich. I’m doing this because it matters. But it only keeps happening if you show me it matters to you too.

Thanks for reading. Always.

#TheTimNapalmStegallSubstack #TimNapalmStegall #TeeVeeCasualty #TVReview #AnimalKingdom #NetflixRevival #TVReckoning #JuliaCodyDeservedBetter #SmurfCody #PopeCody #DeranCody #CraigCody #JoshuaJ #BarryBazBlackwell #EllenBarkin #ShawnHatosy #ScottSpeedman #LeilaGeorge #JakeWeary #BenRobson #JasperPolish #DarrenMann #SpencerTreatClark #ChristinaOchoa #PowerAteThePlot #TooMuchPowerTooLittleSoul #SmurfBuiltSoldiers #StreamingSyndrome #NarrativeFailure #BreakingBadNotIncluded #PunkJournalism #PunkWriting #PunkCriticism #TVAnalysis #SubstackWriter #WritingWithBlood #SupportIndependentVoices #ThisSubstackNeedsYou #NoHopeWithoutYou #KeepPunkJournalismAlive #SubscribeAndSurvive