Every HBO Comedy Ranked From Worst To Best
44. The Brink
An oddball comedy with a star studded cast, The Brink feels as though, with the right tailwind behind it, it could yet find a cult audience. It’s an uneven satire that doesn’t quite live up to its lofty goals, but as a curio at the very least, it’s worth a look.
Jack Black and Tim Robbins star as a foreign services officer and the US secretary of state respectively as the nation lurches into crisis. War with Pakistan seems imminent, and the fate of the country is in the hands of Black’s doofus operative, Robbins’ out of control politician, and a skeezy, drug dealing soldier played expertly by The Wire’s Pablo Schreiber.
The content is rarely as clever as the producers would like to think it is, with the satire on the basic side and the jokes frequently lapsing into crude material, but the strong cast keeps it afloat, and it’s genuinely funny in places.
It doesn’t quite work, and the notion of subsequent seasons focussing on new crises was swiftly kiboshed, but it’s an intriguing production.