As is known, the acronym Chimerica that gives the title to this serial drama refers to the

peculiar economic and geopolitical relationship established between China and the United
States, which had as its starting point the visit of President Richard Nixon to the Asian
nation in 1972, when Mao Tse-Tung ran the country. Upon his death, Deng Xiaoping
consolidated it with the reformist process that turned China into a communist regime but
with a capitalist economy, whose strength has been growing.

Four years after Kirkwood's theatrical premiere, many things had happened, including
Brexit and the elections won by Trump, which showed the wounds and weaknesses of
Western democracy, where freedom of information and choice are often manipulated
through "Fake news". All this led Lucy Kirkwood to consider that it was time to bring her
script to the script, turning to Michael Keillor (Critical, Line of Duty, Cormoran Strike) for
its realization.

Today the Chinese technology giant Huawei, a multinational that buys components from
the United States, sells its products in 170 countries and led the expansion of 5G networks
in many regions of the world.

Chimerica starts from an icon of the confrontation with tyranny that could change the
course of Chinese history: the famous photograph of the man who challenged the tanks in
Tiananmen in the 1989 riots, known throughout the world and silenced in the giant of East.
The photographer who shot that photo from the Beijing Hotel thirty years ago is still living,
his name is Jeff Widener, and at the time he was a correspondent for the Associated Press.

On the anniversary of the massacre in the Chinese square, Kirkwood uses this powerful
premise to unite two moments in the relations between the two powers, that of the past and
that of the present, through the fictional story of Lee Berger (Alessandro Nivola) , a
photojournalist who, after a professional setback that jeopardizes his informative honesty,
travels to China in 2016 hoping to find the mysterious man he photographed thirty years
ago and whose whereabouts are unknown.

The theme of Chimerica is current and the bases of the argument arouse the interest of the
viewer in the first chapter. References to other films, such as The Parallax View or All the
President's Men, are patent. It also has a cast of good actors: in addition to Nivola, Cherry
Jones (Transparent), like Mel Kincald, his colleague and old friend; Sophie Okonedo, as
Tessa Kendrick; or the Oscar-winning F. Murray Abraham (Amadeus), as the editor Frank
Sams. The music of Tom Holkenborg and Shigeru Umebayashi, author of the Yumeji
theme, is also noteworthy.

After a promising start, the search for the mysterious man with the bags is giving way to a
deeper and more complex dimension: the difficulty to distinguish the truth from the lie in
the world of information as a draft of History.

The miniseries, at first glance, explores an intelligent drama with political overtones, using
as a trigger the search for the mysterious and defiant young man with the bags. But as you
delve into it, you discover that it moves to a more convoluted, current and delicate stage:
distinguishing between truth and fallacy in the world of information. The narrative
sometimes plays with solemnity and sometimes with irony (the Trump moment is
invaluable in an interview), placing on the board the already old conflict of information in
the service of power. From China to the United States and vice versa, after 30 years, things
have not changed.

Chimerica is not designed, in my opinion, for any palate. It has confusing and messy
sections that require patience, personal plots that prevail too much over the main one and
that mislead at times, and a montage that denotes, at least in appearance, haste. However,
the skeleton of history, its commitment to the "denunciation" and the already installed
current of fake news in our day to day, manages to seduce enough to unravel something
that "pissed us off": How do we know who? tell us the truth?

The problem is that Kirkwood wants to deal with too many things: the geopolitical
background of the relations between the two countries from a frustrated vision of the
western left, the political moment of the United States, the ethical crisis of a photographer
whose informative honesty is in question, the the problem of "fake news", the friendship
between photographer Lee Berger and his widowed Chinese friend, the enigma behind the
photograph of the man in the tanks, and so on. And the following chapters develop them in
their main and secondary plots with a somewhat confusing and messy script and montage
that make it difficult for the viewer to follow.
Chimerica makes a critical balance of this tacit association between the two main world
powers and draws a disturbing parallel between the ways of exercising power over its
citizens of the Chinese dictatorship and the authoritarian drift through which the United
States government is sliding with the ever-present argument of the fight against terrorism, a
term that no longer seems to encompass only organizations such as Al Qaeda and its allies,
but also internal opposition political movements that, removed from any hint of officialism,
become groups outlawed with the excuse that national security must be safeguarded. At the
same time, there are two important ideas that become a fundamental axis of the series. The
first is the absolute ignorance that the West has of the mentality of Chinese society and its
patterns of behavior. To a large extent, from our countries we see the Asian country we see
it only as a market that can be a highly profitable destination for our products and services,
but we ignore its dynamics and its underlying trends. The second is the feeling of
helplessness that the American liberal world transmits: beyond being a mere passive
spectator, it has become an active agent of the particular symbiosis between the United
States and China and of all its negative implications and collateral damage, losing its
credibility and its ability to influence the course of events from the trust of the voters. In
this sense, the triumph of Trump would be nothing more than the confirmation of the
political, ideological and intellectual impotence of the American liberals to be a real
alternative to a set of policies that are achieving the disaffection of increasingly broad
sectors of society North American.

At this point, it is convenient to return to the term "Chimerica" and to a further derivation
of its formulation. Because the word "Chimerica" refers to the mythological term
"chimera", the creature with the head of a lion, the tail of a dragon and the body of a goat.
To a large extent, the strange association between the United States and China is an
unnatural combination that, sooner or later, is destined to be broken because there are
deeply insurmountable contradictions in it. Chimerica's vision will help us to better
understand the world in which we move and some of its essential keys, which go
suspiciously unnoticed in the unstoppable torrent of today's media.