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Joel Torre as Tatang in a still from On the Job, a political crime thriller set in the Philippines and based on true events. Photo: Star Cinema
Opinion
What a view
by Stephen McCarty
What a view
by Stephen McCarty

Politics meets crime in HBO Go’s On the Job, Philippine miniseries that’s stunning, while Isaac Asimov adaptation Foundation on Apple TV+ travels through space and time

  • An policeman’s pursuit of a case in the Philippines leads him straight to the country’s senate and presidential palace in political crime thriller On the Job
  • Foundation, an Isaac Asimov adaptation, is an action-adventure series imbued as much with fractured relationships and betrayal as with interplanetary warfare
Stephen McCarty
Stephen McCarty
Why you can trust SCMP

If you’ve never seen the work of Filipino filmmaker Erik Matti, then chances are you don’t know the Philippines is capable of producing political crime thrillers to rival the best European or American miniseries.

Solution: strap in for On the Job (HBO Go, all episodes available from October 3), a grimly irresistible tour of the streets, where murder is a way of life, right up to the corridors of a corrupt government – from which “hits” are directed and opponents are neutralised.

Assassins are recruited from a prison to do the dirty work of police chiefs and politicians, who give the killers free passes before quickly returning them to jail.

Go-to hitman Tatang (Joel Torre) works with sidekick Daniel (Gerald Anderson); on their case is principled police officer Francis Coronel Jnr (Piolo Pascual), whose picking at the threads of unsolved murders leads him to the senate and presidential palace.

Gerald Anderson as Daniel in a still from On the Job. Photo: HBO Go

What’s worse is that it exposes his father-in-law so, before he even realises the impossibility of his situation, Coronel is implicated because of his family ties.

Who do you turn to for justice when death squads are out running a country on behalf of its senators, journalists are being eliminated and media is reduced to little more than the government’s mouthpiece?

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Matti and screenwriter Michiko Yamamoto based On the Job on actual events. The first two episodes were shown at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival as a film. The remaining four episodes were shown as its sequel, On the Job: The Missing 8, which premiered at last month’s Venice Film Festival.

While the two, disparate sections of the series make for an inevitable shift in tone, haircuts and fashions, the last four episodes widen the work’s scope to include problems such as fake news and the manipulation of truth in the (dis)information age.

Jared Harris in a still from Foundation. Photo: Apple TV+

Watch this space

And now, strap in for an entirely different sort of ride as we go careering around galaxies near and far in Foundation (Apple TV+), a glittering, ambitious attempt to bring Isaac Asimov’s 1942 book series of the same name to the screen.

Its influence on the likes of Star Wars, Star Trek and Total Recall is clear – the 10-part series (now streaming, new episodes weekly) features Jared Harris as Hari Seldon, visionary mathematician and founder of the predictive science of psychohistory; Lee Pace as the implacable Emperor Brother Day; and Leah Harvey as planet warden Salvor Hardin – all invested, in various ways, in the collapsing Galactic Empire. There’s even a rakish, Han Solo-style trader and pilot in the shape of Hugo Crast, played by Daniel MacPherson.

Lee Pace (centre) in a still from Foundation. Photo: Apple TV+

Leaping through space and time to try to preserve punitive imperial rule on one hand, and knowledge and civilisation on the other, these characters boldly go from shimmering city to frigid globe in the blink of a ship’s hyperspace drive.

If plans to adapt the entire Foundation saga are realised, that same device will be propelling them right into subsequent seasons of this cinematographic masterpiece.

In the meantime, science-fiction fans can bask in an action-adventure tale imbued as much with fractured relationships, betrayal, contemplation and other mysteries as it is with laser-blasters, insurgent armies and interplanetary warfare.

One mystery it seems unable to tackle, however, is why American writers insist on using the abbreviation “math” for the word “mathematics”. Perhaps that’s a question for season two.

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