2023-05-13 15:18:49
Big@Apple
Wyatt Oleff (r.) und Chase Sui Wonders in „Fire in the Sky”
What: Apple TV+
Two million dollars for a thousand pages: Garth Risk Hallberg’s New York novel “City on Fire” was the highest-paid debut of all time. Now Apple has made a series out of it. It hasn’t been that much “I love New York” for a long time.
Eit was like in a fairy tale. Sometime in the noughties, a young romantic named Garth Risk Hallberg came to the city of cities from rural Louisiana and – as if it wasn’t the 21st century but the 19th century and he wasn’t a hillbilly but some sort of Charles Dickens – caught on bus station on his great New York novel.
A decade later—Hallberg had largely spent it at his desk and coffee machine in a stereotypical Manhattan café—the thousand-pager was finished and sold to the highest bidder for a staggering $2 million. “City on Fire” went down in literary history in 2015 as probably the most expensive debut novel of all time.
It wasn’t quite like a fairy tale after all. Because it was the 21st, not the 19th, City on Fire fell short of hyped sales expectations, and many critics, though not all, also didn’t want Garth Risk Hallberg to be a late-born Charles Dickens who spoke about the city of Cities just wrote the novel of novels. “City on Fire” is “the sequel to the weekend one binge watchings by other means,” wrote a critic of WELT. “The short chapters with HBO-compatible cliffhangers” would ensure the necessary reading speed.
But that doesn’t have to be a disadvantage in the 21st century. A certain serial nature might help the starving literature on the jumps; a certain novelty, on the other hand, may do the flattening series production quite well. In any case, it could be said of “City on Fire”, Garth Risk Hallberg’s romantic big city project, that it only really comes into its own as a series – not via HBO, but at Apple (even if it’s in German there – oh what: in Germany – called “Fire in the Sky” for some reason.)
iMac instead of Punk
Pretty much everything that the critics of the novel encountered at the time is to the advantage of the series: the large number of characters as well as their not overly novel-like unambiguity, Hallberg’s penchant for quasi-touristy backdrops and his basic trust in an exciting plot, which was not ailing from any noble restraint. Showrunners Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage (already a team on “Gossip Girl”) were able to film “City on Fire” almost one-to-one, but they moved the plot from 1977 to 2003 in a somewhat ruthless manner.
instead of in Annus mirabilis of punk, the story takes place around the time when Hallberg began his project at the bus station, which in the end only makes the eight almost one-hour episodes more honest: not just formally (the great novel), but also in terms of content (the big city) is alive “City on Fire” yes alone from the myth, which the series knows better than the book.
Hallberg’s Alter Ego: Xavier Clyde as Mercer Goodman
What: Apple TV+
Garth Risk Hallberg’s alter ego Mercer Goodman (Xavier Clyde), for example – who, incorrectly in terms of identity politics, is a black, gay writer from the south – is given a box in the first episode, which is wrapped in somehow punky drawings instead of wrapping paper, but then only contains an aseptic iMac. Mercer is said to be writing a novel on the thing, which will likely become City on Fire.
Two pure goals
But Hallberg’s deputy is just one of two pure fools in this story, who marvel at New York like hobbits at the land of orcs and elves. The second is a Long Island teenager who falls in love with the wild Samantha Young (Chase Sui Wonders), the city made woman. The question of who shot her in the head on the Fourth of July fireworks night in Central Park drives the story, and as little ashamed of this standard crime thriller, the series shies away from the Agatha Christie-esque phalanx of the suspects as a cross-section of society.
There are the filthy rich Hamilton Sweeneys (old East Coast nobility) and the immigrant kids (which includes Samantha), there are the village boys (with a little Sinatra still on their mind), and there are the neopunks from the club’s underground whose cover band (ironically it’s called Ex nihilo, “out of nowhere”, because of) is probably just a cover to light up the hated gentrification undisturbed. And all of this in images with filters and color concepts that make the MTV of yore (a New York invention, of course) seem a bit childish compared to them.
So nothing authentic, everything artificial, everything screensaver nonsense? That would be to underestimate the romantics. “City on Fire” burns heartily for the Big Apple. Only with the means of now.
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