As the headline suggests, spoilers about the ending of Netflix limited series A Man in Full lie ahead.
If you clicked on this article, I can only assume that you have recently finished watching the sixth and final episode of A Man in Full. Right now you are probably feeling shocked, flabbergasted, disgusted, profoundly confused, or some combination of all of these emotions. That is okay. That is normal. If you watched the last ten minutes of A Man in Full and thought, Well, that was a completely understandable way to end a television show and I have no further questions about what I just saw, then I can only conclude that you fell asleep and missed the part where a smirking Tom Pelphrey shows his naked, erect penis to Jeff Daniels in what has to be the weirdest instance of full frontal male nudity in the history of the medium. Those of us who actually saw that scene, then watched it again to make sure we didn’t hallucinate the entire thing, need a place to process what we have witnessed. This, my mildly traumatized friends, is that place.
A Man in Full, written entirely by the perpetually busy David E. Kelley, is an adaptation of the gargantuan 1998 Tom Wolfe novel of the same name that examines race, elitism, and politics in late-’90s Atlanta. Kelley’s version moves the story to the present day and, though it borrows basic storylines from Wolfe’s narrative, also deviates wildly from the original text. And no deviation is wilder than those last ten minutes.
Having resolved the plot surrounding Conrad Hensley (Jon Michael Hill), a Black man who unjustly winds up in prison after assaulting a white police officer — his case is dropped after a blatantly racist judge becomes suddenly and conveniently reasonable in the last episode — the finale turns its attention back to its central conflict: the one between Pelphrey’s Raymond Peepgrass and Daniels’s Charlie Croker. The series has already established that Raymond, a man with a sad apartment and a sad, beat-up BMW, has built his entire life around achieving the satisfaction that will come when the bank he works for finally brings down the famously wealthy Charlie Croker’s real-estate empire. Charlie, who has always seen Raymond as some little peon who helps push around his money, is meanwhile doing whatever he can to avoid financial ruin even though he owes more than $1 billion in unpaid bank loans. On that front, he receives some bad news in the finale: that Raymond has created a new financial entity, Big Red Dog LLC, which is in the process of gaining a majority interest in the Concourse, the skyscraping jewel in Charlie’s real-estate crown, thanks to a partnership Raymond has formed with Charlie’s ex-wife, Martha (Diane Lane). Enraged, Charlie speeds to Martha’s mansion.
Via the magic of montage, we viewers are well aware that at this moment, Raymond is already at Martha’s house and in the middle of railing her into mid-next week. It’s worth noting that in Wolfe’s novel, Raymond does not pursue a romantic relationship with Martha and never has sex with her. But in the Netflix version, Raymond seems to be leveraging whatever genuine attraction exists between the two of them for his own personal gain, and also so that, eventually, Kelley can make an extremely obvious point using Raymond’s dick. (Side note: The series tells us that, prior to this tryst with Raymond, Martha has not had sex or even been kissed in 20 years. While this is far from the series’ most unbelievable detail, it is still pretty far-fetched considering that Martha is played by Diane Lane and we can all see what she looks like!)
Charlie shows up and starts banging on the front and back doors, but Martha and Raymond can’t hear it over the sounds of their own banging, so Charlie uses the spare key, walks in, and finds Raymond in the process of absolutely going to town on Martha. After she screams for him to leave to no avail, Martha runs off to call the cops, leaving Raymond and Charlie alone, behind a locked door, where they finally have the big confrontation A Man in Full has been clumsily leading up to for five and three-quarter episodes. “You think you’re gonna take my building, Mr. Big Red Dog?” drawls Daniels, who infuses Charlie with the accent of Foghorn Leghorn and the anger-management issues of Yosemite Sam.
The whole “big red dog” thing is a callback to something that Raymond says in episode four to Sirja, a woman with whom he (accidentally) fathered a child. “Charlie used to have this expression,” he tells her, because Charlie is constantly quoting dumb expressions. “‘At some point a man needs to let out the big red dog.’” Does that qualify as an expression? If so, is it a good expression? Because on first listen, all it does is remind me of Clifford the Big Red Dog. But given how frequently A Man in Full likes to mention male genitalia — “At the end of the day, a man’s gotta be able to shake his balls” is something Charlie says not once, but twice, during the course of this series — I should have known where all that “big red dog” business was headed.
After an outraged Charlie drops a “How dare you?” in Raymond’s face, Raymond responds with, “It’s time I dare. If not now, when?” Then he whips off the bed sheet draped over his lower region and reveals his penis with an expression on his face that absolutely says, “Ta-da!” even though he doesn’t say it out loud.
Charlie gazes down at the man meat before him, then says, “Big red dog indeed,” and for a half-second it seems like maybe they will have sex. But instead Raymond launches into a bunch of talk about Scottish traditions, including one that involves “fucking the landowner’s wife.” At this time I would just like to point out that David E. Kelley spent many hours writing this show when he easily could have just spent that time chilling with his wife, Michelle Pfeiffer.
Charlie then grabs Raymond by the throat and begins to choke him, at which time his right hand, which often freezes for reasons he still hasn’t gotten diagnosed, seizes up around Raymond’s neck. He can’t let go of his enemy even though he seemingly wants to. Then, just when you think this whole scenario can’t get any more preposterous, Charlie has a heart attack at the same moment Raymond loses access to oxygen, causing them to literally tip over together and die. Again: they just fall over sideways and croak!
In the final moments of A Man in Full, Raymond is taken out of the house in a body bag and Charlie is dead on the floor of his former bedroom, his recently installed bionic knee allowing him to get in one final kick. Like so much of A Man In Full, that mechanical twitch of Charlie’s leg almost registers as intentionally comedic, but not quite. If this ending leaned into its own ridiculousness and was played more obviously for comedy, it might have worked. Other TV shows, specifically The Righteous Gemstones, have done this kind of thing successfully before, and given the number of extremely talented people involved with A Man in Full (Regina King and television vet Thomas Schlamme directed all the episodes, and other members of the cast include Bill Camp, Lucy Liu, and William Jackson Harper), there’s reason to believe the series would be capable of pulling off such a feat. But the tone of everything leading up to this moment falls much too far on the side of the serious — and the self-serious — to allow it to land as anything other than a misguided and bizarre way to end a limited series that wouldn’t recognize subtlety if it walked up and waved its penis in its face.
In an interview with Newsweek, Daniels warned that this conclusion might be polarizing and offensive to some viewers. “It’s the ending that you don’t see coming, and you can’t believe it,” he said. “But it’s plausible.” I am not sure “plausible” is the best word to describe it. “Ridiculous” is a better word. “Disappointing” is another good adjective, and one that applies to the whole series. It’s easy to understand why Kelley thought Wolfe’s novel would be a relevant work to revisit at this point in time. In Charlie Croker, a blustery, conservative real-estate mogul trying to downplay his diminished wealth, there are vague shades of Donald Trump. The police-brutality storyline involving Conrad, another departure from the novel, seems designed to sync up with the post-George Floyd era. And there are moments that speak to the idea that the white male patriarchy is in decline. “World’s gonna make men like me extinct, that’s what they’re gonna do,” Charlie declares during a speech in episode five that in theory foreshadows what’s to come in the finale but in practice sounds like every other tortured aphorism that comes out of his mouth.
But Kelley never tugs hard enough on these threads to convey a coherent message about the present moment, or any moment, for that matter. The ending of A Man in Full simply and bluntly tells us that egocentric men who get caught up in literal dick-swinging contests will eventually be the death of each other. But in addition to being just plain dumb, that conclusion also seems like a cop-out. In the real world, men like Raymond Peepgrass and, especially, Charlie Croker, usually don’t die at a narratively convenient moment. They keep sticking around longer than they should, making life miserable for themselves and the people around them. But an ending that gets at that idea wouldn’t be as shocking or provocative as a penis unveiling that leads to two men finishing (in a manner of speaking) at exactly the same time. If Kelley’s goal was shock and awe, I suppose his conclusion is successful. But if he wanted to make people think, then he has failed here almost as spectacularly as Charlie Croker and Raymond Peepgrass did in the last, embarrassing moments of their lives.
