Halfway through The Offer, a new Paramount+ limited series on the making of The Godfather, the film’s sole producer, Al Ruddy (Miles Teller), has a surprise meeting with two FBI agents. Such shadowy encounters are, as this patchy and self-indulgent ten-part story reveals, par for the course on a production knotted with complications and controversy. These obstacles are, of course, surmounted; the producer quickly charms the FBI agents investigating Ruddy’s budding friendship with New York mob boss Joe Colombo (Giovanni Ribisi, in full ham mode). When one asks why Ruddy left Hogan’s Heroes, the hit sitcom he co-created, to work in the movies, he replies: “TV is too limiting. You can’t tell real stories on TV. It’s fake. And Marlon Brando does not do TV.”
I had to laugh. Here I am, watching 10ish hours of a Paramount+ show about one of Paramount Pictures’ greatest triumphs – a limited series given too-few limits. It’s television, these days, where one could tell a story like this: meta, sprawling, populated with a who’s who of character actors, overlong. (To be fair, it is very in the spirit of The Godfather to go long on time and spare few whims.) The Offer, created by Michael Tolkin, is ostensibly the true story behind the making of the 1972 classic – I’m not here to dispute the Godfather’s legacy – but the show often feels more like a fantasy of male doggedness or Wikipedia article come to life than behind-the-scenes account.
