The second episode of TRUST debuted on Easter Sunday night. Honestly, was caught up watching JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR LIVE before I switched over to TRUST and started it over to catch it from the beginning. SUPERSTAR was about as good as any bad musical might be — Alice Cooper’s Pontius Pilate stole the show. But TRUST started with a bang and helped to push all those terrible Andrew Lloyd Webber lyrics out from between my ears.

The show opens with Brendan Fraser’s James Fletcher Chase donning his ten gallon hat and heading off in search of John Paul Getty III who was kidnapped in Rome at the end of the last episode. Fraser talks directly to the camera talking about how 1973 was a bad year for America — Nixon, Vietnam and the kidnapping of JPG III. Fraser looms large in this episode and a meeting with Donald Sutherland’s JPG I and JPG II at the family’s British estate is Fletcher Chase’s first real introduction. He’s ordered to Rome and he’s off with a tip of his hat and a red white and blue bandanna around his neck, and Bible quotes on his lips.

Fraser’s doings make this episode feel like a procedural shot with split screens in taxis, in police offices, hotel rooms and at the home of JPG III’s mother’s house — the always captivating Hilary Swank also comes into her own here in the show’s second installment. Fraser’s early roles found him typecast as kind of a hunky dolt in movies like George of the Jungle and Encino Man and The Mummy franchise. Fraser is older and burlier now, but his physical gravitas serves him well here, and his goofball charms have now become distilled into a kind of homespun sincerity that masks the doings of a dead serious fixer working to negotiate the release of the grandson of one of the world’s richest men. It’s a great turn and it might signal an unlikely renaissance for an actor who many of us might have written off. I’m glad I was wrong about Fraser because Chase is threatening to outshine Sutherland’s JPG III in this series which only got better the second time around.

This latest installment of Trust continues to feature soundtrack gems like “Prisencolinensinainciusol” a number one hit in Italy in 1972 featuring gibberish English lyrics over a groovy dance track…

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The premiere episode of Trust begins with a scene of John Paul Getty III running through a sunflower field in a panic. The scene cuts to a Hollywood party at the Getty mansion in 1973 where a band is playing Pink Floyd’s “Money” before George Getty kills himself with a barbecue fork to the chest in the middle of a dark garage. George was high on a deadly mix of uppers downers and alcohol. This new anthology series on FX tells the sex drugs and rock ‘n’ roll story of one of America’s richest families, and the scandal that rocked their oil empire at the dawn of the Age of Aquarius.

Created by Simon Beaufoy and directed by Danny Boyle — the team that brought us 127 Hours and Slumdog Millionaire — Trust offers a peek at American royalty through the lens of a central storyline about a teenage JP Getty III getting perpetually wasted and laid before being kidnapped by Roman Mafiosi and testing the mettle, love, and resources of his extended family including his tight-assed grandfather and namesake, John Paul Getty I.

The big attraction here is the casting of Donald Sutherland as JPG I and Brendan Frasier as a cowboy hat-wearing family problem fixer named Fletcher Chase. I’m planning to cover the series’ episodes here on Insomnia because of the countercultural milieu that JPG III wades through with his bell bottom jeans and long red locks. JPG III is played by Harris Dickinson, and his performance along with those of Sutherland and Frasier form a triumvirate of hubris and humor at the center of this true crime drama that revels in the lifestyles of the decadent and infamous. Sutherland is particularly effective as the family’s parasitic patriarch, and the script serves him especially well in a soliloquy on an oil rig in the middle of the ocean where he explains how the family’s oil-shipping-refinery-gas station-hotel businesses avoid paying any taxes by operating at a loss on paper. JPG III likens the arrangement to a spider’s web while Sutherland laughs through a leer.

In the first episode JPG III appears at his grandfather’s English estate which he shares with a harem of girlfriends. He befriends the old man through their mutual appreciation of art and JPG III gains his namesake’s trust before the publication of a European sex magazine reveals that the boy has fallen for the same sex and drugs vices that killed his uncle and debilitated his father — JPG II befriended the Rolling Stones and partied with them in Morocco. After his grandfather reneges on paying his debts to the Italian toughs, JPG III returns to Rome in hopes of outrunning his family name and his personal troubles.

One of the most effective ways the series evokes its period milieu is through its killer soundtrack which includes tunes by Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones, David Bowie and Argent’s “Hold Your Head Up” which pulses through the first episode’s closing scene when gangsters catch up with JPG III.

I’ve been looking forward to this series for months now and this first episode did not disappoint. More on the next episode next week.

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