"The Old Man," premiering Thursday on FX, gives up its secrets slowly — more slowly than I will, should you care to turn to the sports page. For a good while, we might be watching the story of a small-town Vermont widower playing with his dogs, talking with or exchanging phone messages with a daughter, remote and unseen, worrying about the possibility of cognitive decline. His dead wife visits him in a dream. Old man, indeed. But suddenly, there are tin cans strung together to make an alarm, a gun and a fight. Eventually, we learn that Dan Chase (Jeff Bridges) is a man with a past and that the whole point of this story is that the past, buried for decades, is about to catch up with him — to the past's peril.
Chase will leave Vermont, which brings him to the door of Zoe McDonald (Amy Brenneman), a divorced woman from whom he rents a room and who will be in this story for a while longer, possibly for keeps. (Hitchcock went down this road frequently.) This is clear from the official trailer, if we're talking spoilers, which also promises international intrigue. It is clear too that Chase is some sort of master agent, who will not be pulled back into wherever he has got out from. ("Any more you send at me," he announces, "I'm sending back in bags; anyone you send at my kid, I'm sending back in pieces.") Monitoring his flight are Harold Harper (an admirably contained John Lithgow), an assistant FBI director with whom he has history (the series might plausibly be titled "The Old Men"); Lithgow's assistant, agent Angela Adams (Alia Shawkat — "as you've never seen her," I want to say) who seems a force for good; and agent Raymond Waters (E.J. Bonilla), who might be a force for less good.
Developed by Jonathan E. Steinberg and Robert Levine from, but not limited to, the book by Thomas Perry, the series shifts some of the novel's ancient history from Libya to Afghanistan, back when it was a Russian headache. (Both Bridges and Lithgow have well-cast younger counterparts, Bill Heck and Christopher Redman, respectively.)
