The sheer amount of scripted TV in the streaming era means that very few shows become weekly appointment viewing, or even the stuff of casual watercooler talk, as the social currency of discussing television has turned to focus on not what you’ve watched, but how much you’ve watched. That can be a bummer; on the other hand, though, there’s now so much TV that seemingly every niche is being catered to—from bizarro sketch comedy to explainer journalism to everything in between.
But even in this “anything goes” landscape, Too Old to Die Young—the Amazon Prime miniseries from Danish auteur Nicolas Winding Refn, which dropped on Friday—is so absurd in its specificity that it borders on parody. Refn is an enigmatic director capable of stunning, neon-lit compositions and visceral ultraviolence; unsurprisingly, his provocative filmography has never made him anything close to resembling a box office draw, sans 2011’s Drive. And yet Refn—along with renowned comics scribe Ed Brubaker, the show’s cocreator—somehow convinced Amazon to give him the reins for a 13-hour, 10-episode TV series. Too Old to Die Young is something that will only appeal to Refn die-hards; the people who believe Only God Forgives is an unheralded triumph instead of a self-indulgent dumpster fire. I am admittedly one of those people, but even I would admit that our group is rather small. And yet, now we’ve got a whole TV show to ourselves?
Perhaps because Too Old to Die Young is such an acquired taste, it hasn’t been promoted by Amazon and, as of this writing, can only be found via manual search. Netflix arbitrarily buries its own programming all the time, but it’s a curious choice for Amazon given the effort put into this thing. The budget for the series hasn’t been reported, but Too Old to Die Young is dripping in a gorgeous neo-noir aesthetic (courtesy of Refn and lauded cinematographer Darius Khondji), treats Los Angeles like a scuzzy playground, and is headlined by an A-list star in Miles Teller—the series isn’t exactly a drop-in-the-bucket sitcom.
Refn could’ve done anything he wanted after the overwhelming success of Drive; he was considered, at separate times, for the James Bond movie Spectre and Denzel Washington’s adaptation of The Equalizer. Those projects never came to fruition as Refn continued doing his own weird thing, which is how we got Only God Forgives and The Neon Demon. And because of his insistence on provocation, Refn was an unlikely candidate to receive a blank check, which is exactly what he seems to have been given to make Too Old to Die Young in all its manic glory. Even as the director declares that his show is actually a 13-hour movie—which, c’mon dude, no—its closest artistic comparison on the small screen is Twin Peaks: The Return, the 18-episode masterwork from David Lynch. The Return was pure, unfiltered Lynch, but Showtime gave the auteur free rein under the pretext of Twin Peaks nostalgia, even if Lynch ultimately sought to weaponize those feelings against his audience.
Too Old to Die Young has no such nostalgic precedents, making the series—even in the streaming era, with more shows being made than ever before—an unparalleled television production in terms of scale, ambition, and arthouse sensibility. It’s a singular vision that gives a minority audience everything they love about Refn and a majority audience everything they hate about him: the violence, the unfailing nihilism, the cacophony of neon lights, along with the delicious synth score from frequent collaborator Cliff Martinez. The show also gives us Billy Baldwin growling while holding a stuffed tiger. For anyone who’s never had a taste for Refn’s movies, watching 754 tedious minutes of Too Old to Die Young would basically be self-inflicted torture. But for Refn heads, the series isn’t just Peak #byNWR—it’s his glacially paced, evocative, brutal masterpiece.
Refn has claimed Too Old to Die Young can be watched in any order; he backed up that bold statement by screening the fourth and fifth episodes at Cannes and only providing those installments to TV critics ahead of the show’s release. This is iconic Refn-style bluster—imagine Quentin Tarantino screening the middle 45 minutes of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and being like, “You have enough to write your review now”—but it’s also a bit of a litmus test as to whether one can handle the show. While the fourth and fifth episodes do compile some of the show’s finest moments—highlighted by a nighttime car chase featuring smut filmmakers and scored to Barry Manilow’s “Mandy”—they also sample the viewer’s endurance for the material, as the fifth episode opens with a tense, excruciatingly slow buildup to the gang rape of an 18-year-old. “You’re either in or you’re out,” Refn seems to say as his lens holds on the scene.
But contrary to Refn’s insistence that the show could be viewed out of order, Too Old to Die Young does have a linear narrative that’s easy to follow, and one that’s often compelling to (very slowly) marinate in. Teller plays Martin Jones, a detective in Los Angeles who comes into the orbit of Viggo (John Hawkes), a dying ex-cop who kills L.A.’s worst of the worst under the guidance of a beguiling seer named Diana (Jena Malone). Soon, Martin begins moonlighting with Viggo, killing lots of bad people, many of whom are connected to pedophilia. There is a bitter irony to Martin’s pure convictions, however: He’s been in a relationship with a 17-year-old named Janey (Nell Tiger Free), whom he started dating when she was 16.
In the spirit of Gosling’s characters in Drive and Only God Forgives, Martin is a relative mute; more distressingly, in lieu of wearing a dope white scorpion jacket, he unloads an unconscionable amount of spit. The dialogue-to-spitting-on-the-ground ratio is way too close to being 50-50. There’s also a parallel story line focused on a man named Jesus (Augusto Aguilera), whose assassinated mother—subtly named Magdalena—was one of L.A.’s top kingpins. Jesus goes on a sabbatical to Mexico before taking over the business, finding his partner Yaritza (Cristina Rodlo) in the process. Yaritza does some moonlighting of her own, killing cartel men and freeing their subjugated women, referring to herself as “The High Priestess of Death.”
The story lines of Martin, Jesus, and Yaritza do eventually intersect—if you wanna watch out of order, which Refn says is totally cool, you can skip to the eighth episode and see it play out. But even though Too Old to Die Young wields a slow-building linear narrative, much like Refn’s movies, the story beats take a back seat so that the auteur can establish a capital-M Mood. The Mood is a familiar one: The neon-tinted world of Too Old to Die Young is inhabited by myriad rapists, gangsters, and pedophiles, reflecting not just the worst in humanity, but a society that enables their impulses.
It sounds heavy—and most of the time, it is—but in a welcome change of pace, Refn lets some dark levity into his twisted world. The detectives Martin works with are overwhelmingly inept and prone to chanting “FASCISM! FASCISM! FASCISM!” in the office. (I really don’t know how else to explain it.) The perps in the aforementioned chase sequence from the fifth episode make the mistake of taking an electric car, and eventually run of out battery in the middle of the desert, bickering about it like they’re in a Coen brothers movie. Best of all, as Janey’s father Theo, Billy Baldwin gives a heat check for the ages—meeting the adult sleeping with his underage daughter with enthusiasm, he calls Martin a tiger, growls at him (like a tiger, obviously), quotes Richard Nixon, and later, furiously masturbates in his personal theater while Martin sits one row behind him.
In classic Refn fashion, his lead characters follow the languid pacing of the story, always speaking like they’re functioning at 0.25 speed. Thankfully, not all characters in the Too Old to Die Young universe adhere to these principles. The strangers who interact with the leads are rightfully befuddled—after all, they’re encountering absolute weirdos who seem to be learning words right as they’re coming out of their mouths.
Too Old to Die Young does offer some encouraging tweaks to Refn’s signature blend of brutal violence and overt sexuality. There are often biblical figures in Refn films whose own violent forms of justice counteract the brutality other characters inflict on women and children—see: Vithaya Pansringarm’s police lieutenant in Only God Forgives. Martin serves that purpose, but as evinced by his (literally illegal!) relationship with Janey, he’s a false idol. Instead, it’s Yaritza who ultimately proves herself to be a savior worthy of mythical pronouncement and, most tellingly, a kickass jacket rivaling Gosling’s in Drive. Refn is still a provocateur who heavily deals with sexual violence, but with Yaritza—coming off the heels of the absurd, female-driven thrills of The Neon Demon—Refn is finally giving his female characters agency rather than merely using them as bloodied victims.
Too Old to Die Young is incredible—or, at the very least, incredibly unique. The series is undoubtedly the most auteur-driven piece of television since Lynch gave us surrealist nightmares, atom bombs, and Dougie Jones. But there’s a clear distinction between Lynch and Refn’s respective shows: how they’re meant to be consumed. Watching a bunch of episodes at once is called a binge because, like binge-eating, it’s gluttonous in a way that doesn’t necessarily feel good. And while Showtime did make the first four episodes of Lynch’s The Return available to stream on its opening night, the rest of the series was laid out with weekly installments and a two-part finale. That was to everyone’s advantage, including impulsive binge-watchers: If you sat down and inhaled eight episodes of The Return, you’d probably start leaking brain fluid by the sixth hour.
But instead of going the weekly route of The Romanoffs, Amazon’s similarly self-indulgent series from Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner, Too Old to Die Young was dropped in all its exhaustive, 13-hour entirety. Absorbing 13 hours of unadulterated Refn in the span of 60 hours, which I ended up doing, is … not recommended. I feel like I’ve aged 20 years in the span of a couple of days.
Amazon’s miscalculated release of Too Old to Die Young, dropped with little publicity on the streaming service, means its contents will be left for Refn fanatics and unsuspecting victims to consume at any point. For most of the viewing public, then, consider this a warning to avoid Too Old to Die Young at all costs. For the small but vocal minority who love this Danish weirdo, it’s best to follow the show’s lead and savor every interminable moment at a snail’s pace.
