New York, 1998. Dr. Martin Wheatley (Michael Sheen), who is about to go to jail for his atrocities, finally reminds his son Malcolm that he loves him forever. The wife is unable to look at the serial maniac exposed, and the urban population is horrified that a respected cardiac surgeon killed more than twenty people.
Two decades have passed. Now Malcolm Wheatley (Tom Payne), who changed his name to Bright, is a special FBI agent who searches for and neutralizes criminals. Whitley Bright aspired to this post from a student's bench. However, after the first operation shown in the pilot episode, the FBI leadership, for reasons not very justified, decides to fire the special agent.
The first five minutes of the story are interrupted by flashbacks from Bright's painful past, connected with visits to his father in prison. The last memory of his son dates back to college times - then Malcolm came to his father and said that he was getting an internship at the FBI. This, of course, Martin Wheatley did not like.
Some memories come to Bright in the form of nightmares. In addition, the hero of Payne is prone to bouts of sleepwalking, because of which, in a rather sophisticated way, he ties himself to the bed before going to bed.
On the advice of her sister, the hero decides to take a break and move away from forensic science, but an old friend - the chief of the New York Police Department, Jill - immediately turns to him for help and asks him to work as a profiler. Bright has a pathological craving for forensics and a “gift” for profiling, coupled with it, and therefore, without hesitation, he agrees. Actually, unusual talent also helps Malcolm to determine on the spot that the latest murders were committed by his father’s copycat.
In fact, one can’t speculate on the further development of events (for sure, those who watched the multi-part aesthetic thriller “Hannibal” with Mads Mikkelsen and Hugh Dancy guessed what was happening from the first minutes). For a clue, Malcolm goes to his father ...
Due to the plot allusions, the viewer may think that producer Greg Berlanti and director Lee Toland Krieger (both had a hand in Riverdale and Sabrina's Chilling Adventures) released a surrogate version of Brian Fuller's Hannibal. True, “The Prodigal Son" is a project with less visually rich solutions: structures from dead bodies or the culinary fetishism of “Hannibal”, perhaps, should not be expected from him. But human heads in formalin are present in abundance.
However, according to the results of the pilot series, it would be unfair to call openly imitative “The Prodigal Son”: most likely, the series will be helped to “sway” by a conflict based on paternal-sons relations and a little-known Martin Whitley background. The only thing we know about the doctor is that he suffers from sociopathy, and still loves his son wholeheartedly and is afraid that he will stop visiting him in prison. Wheatley Jr. knows: the father can directly or indirectly participate in new murders, since the son will certainly turn to him for answers.
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Bright himself seems to be experiencing something that is now commonly called guilty pleasure (literally, this expression translates from English as “shameful pleasure”). He blames and does not understand his father, but still ponders the proposal to investigate the crimes together.
In childhood, Bright showed a keen interest in the field of professional interests of Wheatley Sr. His son hardly dreamed of following in his footsteps. However, Martin Wheatley died for Malcolm, admitting to twenty murders.
Until 2013, many doubted that someone would be able to outshine Lecter by Anthony Hopkins (Silence of the Lambs). Then it turned out that the serial Hannibal Mikkelsen is even more sophisticated than his film incarnation. If Martin Wheatley exists in one reality with the book of Thomas Harris, then he was uniquely inspired by the actions of Lecter (or they were inspired by the screenwriter Chris Fedak - but, rather, schematically and without details).
In short, the analogies with Lecter in The Prodigal Son are obvious. Although Michael Sheen is given a modest screen time (as Hopkins once did), he copes with the role of a maniac sociopath perfectly. The son of the profiler was originally to be played by Finn Jones (Loras Tyrell from Game of Thrones), but after the filming of the pilot, the creators realized that the character of Jones did not match Malcolm Bright. In the end, the choice fell on the already auditioning Tom Payne.