In the early moments of Trust, FX’s thrumming drama about the kidnapping of John Paul Getty III, the camera dives after a bikini-clad woman into a swimming pool. It surfaces and follows another bikinied backside into a crowded party. It’s 1973 in the Hollywood Hills. Pink Floyd is playing as the camera swans through hundreds of half-dressed, sun-soaked revelers, around a mansion, and into a garage window, where—the ka-chings of “Money” still audible — a frenzied man in early middle age grabs a barbecue fork and commits seppuku with it.
Welcome to Trust, a series that, in the spirit of the dysfunctional, wealthy family at its center, does everything in excess. The man who has killed himself with a barbecue utensil is George Getty, the son and protégé of the cheapest rich man in the world, the oil tycoon John Paul Getty Sr. (Donald Sutherland), and he is no more than a footnote in his family’s story. Getty Sr., informed of his son’s suicide while a butler brushes his teeth, snarls, “No, I will not have suicide! I will not have that!” like a man used to altering the past with his tone. He goes down to breakfast at his enormous British estate, where the four women who constitute his harem are dressed in mourning, and evinces no emotion, until the butler tells him the price of the newspaper has gone up by tuppence. He writes the new price down in a small notebook.
In the show’s telling, it is Getty Sr.’s pathological parsimony that both inaugurates and elongates his grandson’s kidnapping, an event Trust explores with high energy. The show has a colorful aesthetic, a playful form, a whirring plot, a large cast, a rock ’n’ roll soundtrack, ornate dialogue, and dense, over-the-top details that include penile injections, pet lions, naps underneath Renaissance paintings, ten-gallon cowboy hats, clue-dropping living statues, clumpy milk mustaches, Italian street riots, parties at Roman Polanski’s house, and vast fields of drooping sunflowers. Written by Simon Beaufoy and directed by Danny Boyle, Trust has been imagined as an anthology—Season 2 might, Beaufoy suggests, be set in the 1930s and follow John Paul Getty as he makes his fortune—and, like FX’s American Crime Story, a Ryan Murphy–produced anthology series, it brings a naughty sense of fun to sordid historical events, turning the extended kidnapping of a 16-year-old into maximalist entertainment.
The first episode stays close to Getty Sr. and his sneering POV. His son’s death has robbed him of a successor, and his three living sons seem to him like poor replacements—not that he’s done the fathering to deserve better. Getty Sr.’s capacity for introspection is as small as his fortune is vast. “Is this to be my legacy, my feckless progeny?” he self-pityingly sobs. Sutherland approaches the part like a carnivore in a rabbit hutch; every moment is easy feasting. Into this succession vacuum prances John Paul Getty III (Harris Dickinson), a red-haired, wiry Adonis in Converse and debt. Paul, as he’s called, barely knows his grandfather and so does not exactly fear him. His lack of fealty and his knowledge of the Elgin Marbles temporarily charms the old man, who shares with him the tax-free structure of his oil empire, only to abruptly turn on him, sending him back to Rome and his oddly contradictory existence: penniless day to day, yet future inheritor of a vast fortune, a contradiction that leads directly to his kidnapping.
The second episode swivels POVs and takes up with Getty’s fixer Fletcher Chace (Brendan Fraser), an ex-CIA agent with a heavy Texan accent. En route to Rome to sort out the kidnapping, he sips on a glass bottle of milk in the back seat of a car and addresses the audience directly, explaining that 1973 was “a mousy-haired, in between girlfriend of a year, the year the milk went sour, and a young kid disappeared.” Chace has the kind of can-do American know-how of a Coen Brothers character, where bullheaded gaucheness acts as a disarming form of down-home competence. He’s the kind of man who sits in a trattoria skeptically inspecting a forkful of spaghetti that he believes has “an obvious design flaw.” The Texan in him doesn’t understand why the pasta doesn’t just fit on a fork; the fixer in him doesn’t mind playing the weird rube to get the job done. Speaking no Italian, he gets a hotel room, hangs an American flag from the window, and immediately introduces himself to the mafia and anyone else who might know anything about Paul’s whereabouts, including Paul’s mother Gail (Hilary Swank). Chace has a paunch but also a bruiser’s grace, accentuated by the debonair, ’70s-style split-screen effects used in the episode, giving it a smooth The Thomas Crown Affair pep.
“You’d think that being rich would be a breeze,” Chace tells the audience at the end of the second episode. “Turns out a rich life is just as messed up as a poor life, just a different kind of messed up.” This, anyway, is what Chace believes at this point in the show—that’s he’s just a guy who works for another guy with rich-people problems. But if Trust is to be anything more than the sum of its shiny, debauched parts, it has to push more than the “profanely rich people, they’re just like us” line. In the first three episodes (of 10 total), you can see the show beginning to lay out the case that hereditary wealth is like some disfiguring genetic condition, a powerful malignancy—a soul gout—that keeps the Gettys from resembling regular people at all. They’re nothing like us. There’s too much money in the way.
This is true for Paul, anyway. Prior to his kidnapping, he has been living in bohemian squalor, avoiding his family and his mother’s money, without quite realizing that he’d been borrowing on the credit inherent in his name all the while. Unlike Ridley Scott’s lean, controversy-plagued take on the Getty kidnapping, All the Money in the World, in which Paul was completely innocent of all wrongdoing, Trust gives the original kidnapping a significantly more complicated origin. Paul’s money follows him, even when he thinks it’s not there, and his decision to try to cash it in only comes after everyone else around him has used his surname as a charge card.
Trust is frenetically entertaining, but there’s something insurmountably icky, if uncomfortably true, about its premise: Wealth makes people more interesting. The Gettys’ money makes them grotesque, but it also makes them spellbinding. Getty Sr. has everything in the world but is still a miserly, miserable old coot. It’s only the first part—the having everything—that has made him a legend. In focusing on the tragedy of a poor little rich boy whose life is shattered by, among other villains, the mean, money-grubbing Scrooge McRich he calls grandfather, the show at once skewers the soulless, wasteful, cruel, indolent, idiotic plutocracy while holding it up as an outsize version of humanity, more extreme, more fascinating. A reasonably well-off Getty clan wouldn’t be so operatically awful, but it also wouldn’t have its own TV show. The family is aspirational and anti-aspirational simultaneously: No one would want to be them, but you’ll want to watch them.
