World on Fire: Season One

By: Amos Lassen

"WORLD ON FIRE"
Season One
Amos Lassen

"World on Fire" is an emotionally gripping World War II drama that follows the intertwining fates of ordinary people in five countries as they face the effects of the war on their everyday lives. Set in Britain, Poland, France, Germany and the United States, the events take place during the first year of the war.

World Wars swept across nations, continents, and social classes. In the United Kingdom in 1939, both the well-heeled Chase family and the working-class Bennett family become deeply involved in the war and intertwined with each other. Aspiring jazz singer Lois Bennett (Julia Brown) and Harry Chase (Jonah Hauer-King) met and fell in love as anti-fascist activists, despite his snobby mother Robina's efforts to break them up. Instead, the Foreign Office severs their romance by posting Harry (a gifted linguist) in Poland. While there, he has an affair with Kasia Tomaszeski (Zofia Wichlacz), a pretty waitress. Nancy Campbell (Helen Hunt), a hawkish American radio journalist, convinces Chase to marry Tomaszeski in order to save her from the of the inevitable National Socialist occupation. However, she crosses him up, sending her little brother Jan (Eryk Biedunkiewicz) in her place and this surprises Mother Robina (Lesley Manville).

To further complicate matters, Bennett is pregnant with Chase's child but she does not wants anything to do with him or his family. Her father, Douglas Bennett (Sean Bean) is a pacifist after suffering PTSD during WWI) is more pragmatic. He also has a son to worry about. To avoid prison time, Tom Bennett enlisted in the Navy and that will soon bring him into harm's way.

Campbell returns to Berlin, where she starts investigating the National Socialists' euthanasia policies, while angered about the restrictions placed on her by her minder/censor. It is personal for Campbell, because of her affection for a neighbor's daughter who suffers from epilepsy. She is also concerned about the safety of her nephew, Webster O'Connor (Brian J. Smith), a doctor at the American Hospital in Paris and having a secret romance relationship with Albert Fallou, a French North African jazz musician.

We have a massive cast of supporting players making this is a true ensemble piece. There are Polish resistance fighters, a German couple trying to hide their daughter's epilepsy from the doctors who would euthanize her, Nancy's Nazi handler, some jazz musicians, many soldiers and sailors, and so on. While this makes some of the characters harder to become acquainted with than others, every storyline is intense, so when someone disappears for a spell, the mind does tend to wander-it's to writer Peter Bowker's credit that all the characters are reasonably well-developed, and a fairly high number are consistently engaging and complex. This isn't true about the Nazis but this isn't a both-sides-now kind of story, and the only Nazis are by and large devices of the plot, meant to remind us that wars are often fought by terrified young people.

War isn't just the setting here, either. The characters often reckon with the costs of war, but they also tend to struggle with their own ideas about it. This is especially true of Bean and Manville's characters. Douglas, the pacifist still struggles with shellshock years after his experiences in the Battle of the Somme. He struggles with the parameters of beliefs that had seemed absolute, particularly when his troubled son (Ewan Mitchell) joins up. His intellectual and emotional struggles are further spurred by Robina, who seems to relish an uncomfortable conversation and has her own complicated relationship with the cost of war. We have an awkwardly charming pilot (Arthur Darvill) who says he fights so that other people have the freedom to go on living however they choose, acknowledging that his job is to kill people shows him as a person trying desperately to acclimate themselves to a horrifying reality, and call it by its name. Every day, the news is big and bold, and so are the fears of cataclysm and the urge to take care of loved ones.

Helen Hunt does some of her best work as Campbell. She plays her with sharpness and also conveys her vulnerability in scenes where her character is trying not to be vulnerable. Wichlacz is wonderful as Tomaszeski, who will be profoundly changed by war. Fans of Polish cinema will recognize Tomasz Kot as Tomaszeski's veteran father, Stefan.

A second season has already been given the go ahead. The focus is on the lives of people far from the podiums and big historical moments. This is an ambitious and broad look at the onslaught of war and the ugliness - as well as the occasional heroism, but mostly the ugliness - that it ushered in.
There's a gay love story between a doctor and a Black jazz saxophonist in Paris, and they remain cardboard cutouts throughout. Their plot amounts to little more than set-up - perhaps to be extended more thoroughly next season, perhaps not.