Review: The reluctant hit man: A new antihero arises in Cinemax’s ‘70s-set Southern noir ‘Quarry’

When we first meet Mac Conway (Logan Marshall-Green) in the flash-forward that opens the Cinemax drama “Quarry,” he’s floating face-down, like a corpse, near the edge of a river. After a moment or two of stillness, he rises out of the water like a newly baptized convert, but what follows is hardly redemptive: Mac walks a few paces, shoots a man twice in the back, then sends the body off with the current.

Mac’s journey to this low point is the focus of “Quarry,” a Southern noir about a Vietnam veteran reluctantly drawn into a career as a hit man. The story begins in the summer of 1972 when Mac, a Marine, returns to Memphis from his second tour of duty with a David Crosby mustache and — even more alarming — an acute case of what we now know as post traumatic stress disorder.

There’s more. Implicated but found innocent of wrongdoing in a My Lai-like massacre, Mac and his buddy Arthur (Jamie Hector) are branded as baby-killers and find it nearly impossible to land jobs. Mac’s marriage to Joni (Jodi Balfour), an arts reporter at a local newspaper, is also strained after a year apart, and his habit of self-medicating with bourbon isn’t helping matters.

When a mysterious crime boss, known only as the Broker (Peter Mullan), tries to recruit Mac and Arthur as hit men, Mac initially rebuffs the offer. But he agrees to help Arthur on a hit that goes terribly wrong, leaving him $30,000 in debt to the Broker. Mac becomes a kind of indentured assassin, nicknamed “Quarry,” because, as the Broker puts it, he is “hollowed out on the inside, hard as rock on the outside.”

It’s an apt, if awkward metaphor. Like many TV antiheroes, Mac is an amalgamation of seemingly contradictory traits. Prone to lashing out, he’s also a sensitive soul who loves listening to Otis Redding and Southern spirituals as well as swimming laps in a pool he built by hand. Racially progressive and antiwar enough to have a George McGovern sign on his lawn, he nevertheless dispatches his targets with ruthless efficiency.

With his hirsute look, propensity for mumbling and love of day-drinking, Mac is reminiscent of Rust Cohle, Matthew McConaughey’s tortured cop from the first season of “True Detective.” Marshall-Green plays Mac with a sweat-glazed, feral intensity that is often captivating. But his performance is somewhat undercut by the lack of specificity regarding Mac’s experiences in Vietnam, which are frequently alluded to — but scarcely explained — via oblique flashbacks. We understand that Mac’s a Wounded Soul, but at some point, “Quarry” needs to push past the stereotype.

Based loosely on the novels by Max Allan Collins and created by Michael D. Fuller & Graham Gordy, “Quarry” is the latest original series from Cinemax. In recent years, the network has tried to shed its reputation for after-hours adult entertainment with shows including “Banshee,” a shoot-em-up thriller about an ex-con turned small-town Pennsylvania sheriff, and “The Knick,” Steven Soderbergh’s ambitious drama about a coke-addicted surgeon in early 20th century New York.

“Quarry” splits the considerable difference between the two. Like “The Knick,” it’s a grim period piece that revels in the squalor of an earlier era, albeit one that swaps the corsets for double-knit suits. And like “Banshee,” with which it shares an executive producer and show runner in Greg Yaitanes (who also directed all eight episodes of the first season), it’s a drama about a mysterious man with a violent past and the woman whose heart he’s trying to reclaim.

Fuller and Gordy were also both writers on the Sundance drama “Rectify,” which may account for “Quarry’s” contemplative pace and may be why, for a crime show about a hit man, the splatter factor is (relatively) low.

The ensemble is rich with eccentric characters played by faces familiar to habitual viewers of cable drama. In addition to Mullan, less terrifying here than he was in “Top of the Lake,” there’s “Justified’s” Damon Herriman, in familiar terrain as a colorful country thug — in this case, Buddy, a gay henchman for the Broker. Ann Dowd, already on a roll with “The Leftovers,” “Olive Kitteridge” and “True Detective,” is predictably great in a small part as Buddy’s mother, a woman who can stitch up a bullet wound on her kitchen table as easily as she can fry up a plate of blood sausage.

Picking up more or less where “Mad Men” left off chronologically, “Quarry” lands at a moment of pop culture interest in the disillusion and debauchery of the 1970s. Perhaps the most compelling aspect of the series is its portrayal of seedy Southern life in the dark years following the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

“Quarry” conveys a strong sense of place without leaning too heavily on cliches. The story unfolds in dingy bingo halls, bait shops, fleabag motels and abandoned slave quarters rather than picturesque plantation houses. In an impressive show of restraint, Yaitanes avoids shots of Spanish moss until halfway through the season.

The show presents a lived-in version of the decade, one in which avocado-green shag carpet and mutton chop sideburns seem like natural parts of the environment rather than ridiculous aesthetic missteps to be laughed at in hindsight. Similarly, headlines about the murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics and the divisive 1972 presidential election lend to the aura of gloom.

Some viewers may find “Quarry’s” atmosphere oppressive and unrelenting, like Memphis in August, and a few more moments of levity would be welcome, but just as many are likely to be seduced.

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“Quarry”

Where: Cinemax

When: 10 p.m. Fridays

Rating: TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 17)

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