The Sympathizer (miniseries)

The Sympathizer (Vietnamese: Cảm tình viên) is a historical black comedy-drama television miniseries based on the 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name by Viet Thanh Nguyen.

The series was created by co-showrunners Park Chan-wook and Don McKellar, with Park directing the first three episodes. The series premiered on HBO on April 14, 2024, and is produced by A24 and Rhombus Media.

The series is based on the story of the Captain, a North Vietnamese spy serving in the South Vietnamese army. He is forced to flee to the United States with his general at the end of the Vietnam War. While living within a community of South Vietnamese refugees in Southern California, he continues to secretly spy on the community and report back to the Communist Vietnamese government that took control of the country. He struggles between his original loyalties and his new life.

According to author Viet Thanh Nguyen, he insisted that any show adapted from his novel The Sympathizer be centered around Vietnamese people speaking Vietnamese. In early meetings, producers were uneasy about this requirement, but after political unrests during the Trump administration, the murders of George Floyd in 2020 and of six Asian-American women in Atlanta in 2021, the tone shifted.

In April 2021, Viet Thanh Nguyen announced that the novel had been optioned by A24 to be adapted into a television series with Park Chan-wook directing. Rhombus Media is also involved in the production. In July, HBO ordered the series from A24, and Robert Downey Jr. joined the project in a producer and co-star role. The state of California awarded the production over $17.4 million in tax credits ensuring significant production would take place in state. Marc Munden and Fernando Meirelles were also hired to direct some episodes of the series.

Casting director Jennifer Venditti opened a worldwide casting call in order to find a main cast of Vietnamese descent, ultimately hiring Hoa Xuande, Fred Nguyen Khan, Toan Le, Vy Le, and Alan Trong. Recurring roles for Sandra Oh, Kieu Chinh, and Nguyen Cao Ky Duyen were also announced in November 2022, and Downey was portraying several supporting antagonistic roles representing the American establishment. In May 2023, Scott Ly and Marine Delterme joined the cast, in recurring roles.

The majority of the cast and crew are of Vietnamese origin, and more than half of the dialogue is in Vietnamese in order to reflect the Vietnamese experience, including refugees in the United States. Hoa Xuande had to take a crash course to improve his Vietnamese to prepare for the main role.

The actor Phanxinê, who is a well-known filmmaker in Vietnam, wanted to keep his involvement in the project private for as long as possible to minimize the political backlash he might receive. He has said that many friends discouraged him from participating. It took him a while to decide to take the role of The Major because the project is politically sensitive. He finally took it because he saw the role as safe as "he shows a good side of Vietnamese men." Fred Nguyen Khan and Duy Nguyễn, who play the Captain's best friends, are also best friends in real life.

Filming took place in Los Angeles and Thailand. The crew's numerous attempts to obtain permission to film in Vietnam were rebuffed by its government. The production used Thailand as a stand-in for Vietnamese scenes.

Downey shaved his head for the series in order to save the time required to use a bald cap for each of the various characters he portrayed. A significant portion of Downey's performance was improvised.

The series premiered on HBO and became available to stream on Max on April 14, 2024.

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 89% of 73 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 8.3/10. The website's consensus reads: "The Sympathizer does a solidly satisfying job of adapting its ambitious source material, conveying its core themes even as it occasionally struggles with its structure." On Metacritic, the series holds a weighted average score of 80 out of 100, based on 38 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".

The series received much attention in the large Vietnamese American community in California. Younger viewers believe it presents an opportunity to showcase Vietnamese stories to a global audience. For the older generation, the series had stirred some discontent – they view the focus on the lead character, who was a Communist spy, as glorifying the Communists and disparaging the South. However, the community agrees that this is a significant moment for Vietnamese representation in Hollywood.

In Vietnam, the Communist government did not allow the series to be filmed locally, and the completed series was banned from being shown. At the time of the series' premiere, no official Vietnamese translation of The Sympathizer novel (which was released in English in the US) had been published in the country. A major publisher had bought the translation rights years earlier, shortly after the novel won the Pulitzer Prize in the US.

After the series premiered, many articles about its production that were previously published in major newspapers were no longer accessible online, as if there was a censorship directive from the highest level or due to self-censorship, although unevenly applied. An article in the state-run newspaper Tuổi trẻ Thủ đô described the series as "poisonous" and warned that "social media pages belonging to hostile forces [...] acclaimed the content of the series and cleverly integrated details that distorted Vietnamese history to sabotage the Party and the State". It called on young viewers to "heighten vigilance for false information regarding territorial sovereignty as well as Vietnamese history that hostile forces cleverly integrated or propagated via cinematic works." Công an nhân dân, the official mouthpiece of the Ministry of Public Security, stated that the series has "distorted content", was created by "opposing elements", and that the release of the series so close to Reunification Day was made "with negative intention, to distort the triumph of the people of Vietnam."