Reviews

This series fails on two levels. First, it fails to live up to the novel on which it is based. Then, it fails simply on its own. The treatment of the characters is so shallow that it affects our ability to understand their actions or to find them sympathetic. The story is told in a choppy, highly compressed way with lots of cuts that create needless confusion. (If you are going to waste 8 hours on this, you should probably watch a few episodes at a time so the flashbacks and jumps make sense.) The original characters are changed to fit modern DEI requirements and the casting is so ridiculous it must have been done by the beta version of Google Gemini. Yes, sure, quantum physicists can pout and gaze vacantly and wear a lot of lip gloss, but this group of five are highly implausible as five Oxford physics geniuses. Tik Tok influencers? Sure. Reality show stars? Absolutely. But not five great scientists.

I have never seen the Chinese TV version. Perhaps someday there will be a new attempt at a Western version. For now, the original trilogy, in print, may be the best bet.

Let's see... This series glorifies and sugar-coats the violent world of drug dealing. Its characters are outlandishly weird. The plots are improbable. Also,, there is never a dull moment. The dialogue has a light touch, and the sets, costumes and overall look are gorgeous. It's impressive and maybe a little annoying that the characters are so fashionably attired and their surroundings so elegant in almost every scene. The soundtrack was great too, sort of like if Purcell had rewritten his King Arthur opera while on drugs.

Guy Ritchie has a gift for mixing rough criminal elements with toffs in stately British homes. Or, alternatively, for one of the characters, making a term in prison seem like life on a country estate. Plot-wise, one can see the outlines of the ending forming early on, but each episode still contained surprises, and each was a visual treat to boot.

My only concern is that, if there is a season 2, it may be anticlimactic. This was an exciting romp, and it will be hard to sustain.

This series began very promisingly with a detective (Peter Capaldi) moonlighting as a chauffeur and regaling his clients with stories about his life in the police.

In no time at all, he becomes a completely one-dimensional character--a bad male white cop trying to prevent a black female cop from looking into a convict whom he may have unjustly imprisoned for murder. It's pretty clear from Episode 1 that he cuts corners and is not a good guy. He calls the man he put behind bars a "poor man's OJ," which rankles the black female detective.

The female detective, Cush Jumbo, is, of course, in an interracial relationship (her mother--or mother-in-law?--is white). She and her white husband argue about his "privilege." A Hispanic woman is murdered by an abusive white man, said to be a member of an extremist white group. The black female detective is at one point described as Meghan Markle because of her light skin tone. There's plenty more of this obsession with skin tone in every episode.

From the start, the male white establishment is out to get the black female detective. Eight episodes is too many for such a cliched narrative.

The mystery of why a bunch of scientists would be found frozen, naked in the arctic is the only thing that made me watch past the first episode. I should have stopped soon after.

A lot has changed since the first season of True Detective. Now it's the men who are used just for sex by strong, angry women. Every male character is weak, ineffectual, obstructionist, evil or some combination of all of these. One of them has even sent for a mail-order bride. There is also a lot of Native American witchy-woo--visions, ghosts, throat singing, face painting, all-knowing wise women.

There is some gore, e.g. A severed human tongue, but many of the scenes just involve "jump scares" not unlike a tunnel of horrors at an amusement park. The most frightening thing is Kali Reis/Officer Navarro's facial piercings. Most of the characters seem like they were made to look as unattractive as possible.

The dialogue is pretty basic and filled with repetitive expletives. The writers either had a limited vocabulary at their disposal or were just too lazy to write with real impact.

There are the usual woke touchstones. Environmental protesters, an evil mining company, a lesbian teenager.

Jodie Foster plays a detective competently, and that's about the only thing in this show that isn't a complete negative.

As for the plot... don't even ask.

Another mystery set in an affluent suburb (British in this case), in which a wealthy, picture perfect family is torn apart by buried secrets.

There is something exhausting about watching the same plot reworked in all possible permutations. Coben mini-series are usually clever, but this one suffers from a massive logical flaw that renders the whole story absurd.

Cliche warning: It has many. How many people have best friends who know all about hacking and can run down license plates and do background checks? Tthere is the inevitable scene of someone correctly guessing a computer password. Writers should just stop putting passwords on computers instead of subjecting us to these scenes. And there are just a few too many coincidences and connections as the story unfolds.

As for casting, the plucky female lead is not quite convincing as the ex-military tough gal she is supposed to be. She is just too small and thin to believably take down some of the larger men she confronts. Her hair and makeup are always great, even when other characters tell her she looks awful and ask her what's wrong.

On the bright side, I didn't quite realize how little sense this story made until the end, so I enjoyed much of it. The sets are striking--a beautiful British estate and a post-modern home so large it looks almost like a condominium complex, both with bold decor choices. If nothing else, you may get some good ideas for your next couch.

A rating of seven seems fair. Maybe if it were a little shorter, I wouldn't be as annoyed that I spent so much time watching it.

There are elements of the show that seemed promising at first, if not entirely original. Of course it leans on Phillip K. Dick's classic Minority Report, about a computer that predicts crime. It also contains a bit of Westworld--a dangerous AI that sees and knows all, with flashbacks to how it was created, all with ominous piano music in the background. There is a touch of Person of Interest, and the scenes at Quantico recall Mindhunter.

Unfortunately, the story and characters in this show were less compelling than its predecessors. As it progressed, the good guys and bad guys became more stereotypical, the dialogue more strident until, by the end, it was barely watchable.

The Class of '09 includes a black FBI trainee, bursting with righteous anger, who marries a civil rights lawyer, also righteously angry and a bit condescending. There is the spunky female FBI trainee fighting the patriarchy. Another classmate is the gay Iranian female . There is a Latino computer genius who makes a fortune in AI. The class does include some white FBI trainees, one an unhinged racist, another a sheltered white kid from a wealthy family whose privilege is stressed in almost every scene. In general, the white men are ineffectual, obstructive or corrupt.

The writing is extremely inconsistent, sometimes good, sometimes reminiscent of Antifa protest slogans. A couple of lines: "We survived white militia, we can survive white collar," and "White beats black when you're blue."

The dialogue is also not always plausible for the characters speaking it. At one point the black FBI agent tells a story about Rabbi Loew of medieval Prague and the creation of the golem, a clay giant intended to protect the Jews from harm. It seems pretty improbable that his character would recall this bit of old Jewish folklore. From the hand gesture the actor makes-- he mimes holding the golem in one hand--it seems possible he doesn't know that the golem was extremely large. Every few scenes, something very unconvincing happens. It's exasperating.

The frequent flashbacks and flash forwards don't help. The transitions between the three different time periods weren't always smooth or coherent.

During the first two episodes I thought the show might be underrated, but long before the end, it was clear that some good ideas and good performances had been wasted. Very disappointing.

There may be more to Hercule Poirot than a moustache and Belgian accent, however...From this and his previous two adaptations, it's clear that Kenneth Branagh has an eccentric view of how much artistic license should be taken with this character and with Agatha Christie's plots.

Common sense suggests that instead of making so many changes, he should just start over with original characters and narratives. This film and the earlier ones are also really slow, in contrast the Christie's highly readable and enjoyable prose. Branagh may be a great actor and technically proficient filmmaker, but A Haunting in Venice is just awful and a huge waste of a talented cast.

You don't have to be a purist to find the lost, spooked Poirot in this film unfamiliar. His old friend Ariadne Oliver is also completely transformed. The changes made in her character are especially offensive and a real insult to Christie. Is no one watching over her literary estate? And why would Branagh even want make to make such changes in one of Christie's recurring characters?

The casting doesn't help. Tina Fey is better than expected but totally wrong for a role based on Christie herself. Michelle Yeoh is also not bad, though in the book Joyce Reynolds was a thirteen-year old girl. Why not just give Yeoh a more appropriate name, given all the other changes? Her two assistants, played respectively by Ali Khan and Emma Laird, are supposed to be gypsies and half-siblings. Neither one looks the part, and they don't look remotely like one another, though we are told they do. The inept casting and anachronisms keep piling up, while the story stumbles and staggers to the end.

The book Hallowe'en Party that supposedly inspired this film doesn't have the eerie, decadent Venetian atmosphere, but it's better in all other respects.

This is a reasonably entertaining mystery, set in a beautiful locale, with a nice mix of comedy, mystery, and trivia. It's not in the same league as British mysteries that have come before it--Poirot, Foyle's War, Morse, Endeavour, and others. Think of any British crime series or mini-series-- it's probably better than this middling series. It's only welcome because there is so little decent viewing currently.

Problems: McDonald's character is just awful. She's irritable, irritating, emotional, and unprofessional. If this is supposed to provide comedy, it doesn't. As for Dodds, he's more sympathetic, but his quirks are not funny enough to make up for how revolting they are. The butter and chips--yuck. Wearing a parka and sweater in every scene, often indoors--too ridiculous and overdone. As for the ancillary characters (e.g. Their drill sergeant commanding officer), they barely register.

The fact that this show is better than most other current shows, especially in the US, redeems it somewhat, but some recasting and more nuanced writing would help.

This show is supposed to be a mystery/comedy, but in this episode it unintentionally achieved something else:: horror. So many of the characters were so unsympathetic and unappealing that I wanted to close my eyes and ears as if it were a slasher film.

The zeal for inclusionary casting often produces combinations of characters who have no chemistry and are there just for the race, physical handicap or sexual orientation they represent. This show has a little of that, but the main problem is that almost all the characters are obese, crass, grating to listen to, vile, abusive or all of the above. Who cares which one is the murderer when you want to see them all get the electric chair?

Add to that, the murder plot is especially implausible. It hinges on a scenario that could never happen, and the detectives' progress depends on some highly absurd behavior by the murderer. That's not a spoier, because all the suspects behave quite absurdly.

Meanwhile, we have the recurring theme of one of the detectives eating chips (French fries) with pats of butter. This, combined with the plot and characters, helps make the series one of the most nauseating shows ever produced.

I wish I could unlatch this episode, and I've looked up some of the people involved so I can make sure not to watch anything else they are connected to.

As for McDonald & Dodds, I don't know if I can go on. I love a mystery, but this one asks too much.

The first two seasons of this show, featuring Carolyn Quentin as Maddie Magellan, are just about perfect -- a combination of absurd humor and intriguing "impossible" crimes. The character of Adam Klaus as a oversexed, narcissistic Vegas style magician is also hilarious, even with a change in actors over two seasons. The solutions to the crimes are intriguing, and even when they are a bit over-the-top, they are still good entertainment. The not-quite romantic relationship between Creek and Magellan doesn't always make sense, but they have a quirky chemistry and their ups and downs make for some good comedy.

Seasons 3-5, without the Magellan character, are not quite as strong. There is a weird love-triangle in seasons 3-4 involving Jonathan Creek, an old flame, and her husband, who is not at all jealous of the two of them and admits to having been briefly gay. It's odd but not funny--just awkward. There are still some very funny moments, e.g. An episode in which a woman whose pet dog has died starts to date Jonathan Creek but goes for walks with him, plays fetch with him, and generally uses him as a dog-substitute.

In season 5, Creek gives up his frumpy magician assistant persona and becomes a suit-wearing executive in The City. He has an attractive but drearily respectable wife who detests his interest in magic and crime-solving. This new conformity doesn't fit his character at all and the marriage seems unlikely--it's hard to believe the two would get past a first date.. The crimes become increasingly farfetched, though there is still some amusing dialogue and wordplay.

As a whole, the series isn't without flaws--it did go downhill after Carolyn Quentin left, especially in the final season. But the first two seasons were so strong, they outweigh the weak points of what followed. Even the worst episodes of this series are better than most current viewing options..

On this site I always denounce attempts to add wokeness to what would otherwise be a good show. This tendency has ruined many BBC series, especially when it is present in period dramas.

This show has quite a bit of that, and I didn't like how heavy-handed some of the anti-racist and feminist themes were, but the depiction of racism and male chauvinism in that period rings true. Less forgivable is the gentle treatment of communists, who in this series are kind, compassionate idealists. The supporters of capitalism and free markets are shown as crass and unthinking. I suppose that is how the left may have thought of itself. There is only one bad communist in this film (a Russian handler), while all the democratic capitalists are dreadful. The screenwriters of this film and notorious Stalin apologist Walter Duranty have a lot in common.

Still, I give it high marks because it's a good thriller. The plot makes sense, and the acting is outstanding. Michael Stuhlbarg, Emma Stapleton, Keeley Hawes and others deliver great performances. The period is recreated in a plausible way, at least to a non-expert like me. There are twists and surprises, and even if one quibbles with a plot point or two, it's an engrossing series. It also feels about the right length for the story it is trying to tell.

It could have been better with a little less demonizing of Americans and white males and with a little more realism about the communists of that time, but I would still recommend it highly.

Not as good as Vikings, which wasn't that great to begin with. I couldn't stay with it. As with Vikings, there is a tiny kernel of historical accuracy, but this show takes even greater liberties. It also is filled with very unsubtle woke messaging about race and gender. Who knew the Vikings had a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion department? Meanwhile, somehow, the accents got even worse than in Vikings. What country are they supposed to be from? Many of them sound Russian. The dialogue is stale and there are over-the-top fight sequences reminiscent of old Bruce Lee movie. The whole thing has turned into fantasy fiction that might as well be set on another planet. Thinking about all the Viking dramas I have tried, the best (or least bad) was The Last Kingdom (maybe just the first couple of seasons). Vikings was a distant runner up, and Vikings Valhalla is by far the worst.

I enjoyed this to a point, though I confess I didn't make it past the third season. I probably should have quit earlier. As a fan of historical dramas, I appreciate the attempts to incorporate figures from Norse sagas and mythology into the story. I also loved the whole look of the show and its soundtrack. Still, this was more soap opera than history, and less interesting than the real history of Ragnar Lothrok.

The reasons I stopped watching were two-fold:

First, the terrible acting. Really unbelievably bad. The actor who plays Ragnar approaches every situation with a glassy, vacant stare and a smirk. I think this is supposed to show that he is brave or visionary, but to me it looked like he was on mushrooms all the time. Katherine Winnick is memorably awful as Lagertha. She has only two facial expressions: scowling and scornful. (Okay, she can also simmer and sulk.) On the other hand, she has many accents and uses all of them in each scene--vaguely Scandinavian, sort of British, and contemporary North American. She can't stay in character for three seconds. Some of the other female characters looked like they just stepped in off a fashion runway, which they probably did. None of them is plausible, and the excessive costumes, make-up and hair treatments don't help. There are thousands of unemployed drama school graduates waiting tables in New York and Los Angeles who would have better at these roles, male and female.

Second, the plot. Spend five minutes with what is really known about Ragnar Lothrok and then ask, "Why did they change and fabricate so much?" The real stories from the sagas are fascinating, a little implausible at times, and in the end far better than the absurdities invented in this show. Less would have been more. For me, the final episode of Season 3 was the last straw.

There is one other issue that didn't stop me from watching but still grated: the political contradictions of the series. It tries to be modern and show how abusively men treated women at that time. At the same time, it unrealistically gives some of the female characters far greater power than they would have had. It depicts the main characters sympathetically, romanticizing the cruelty of the Vikings, whose invasions were as murderous as anything future conquistadors and colonialists did.

Good luck, may Odin protect you!

As a melodrama, this is merely okay. As an adaptation, F-minus. It should be illegal. It's fraudulent to charge viewers for streaming or downloading an "adaptation" so far removed from the work it is supposedly based on that it is unrecognizable. I can't believe Ken Follett lent his name to this, though I imagine once he sold the rights he didn't have much control. Still, someone should be pilloried, flogged, hanged or sued.

I didn't expect this to be a faithful retelling of the book. It's a crowded novel, filled with minor characters and subplots. Including them all would have been fun, and I would have sat through as many seasons as it took, but I understand that sacrifices must be made. So I expected some subplots and characters to be omitted, others to be combined, e.g taking two evil characters and making them one very evil character.

What has been done here, however, is ridiculous It's just not the same story. Major, not minor, plots and characters have been altered dramatically, and characters and plots have been added. Didn't the novel offer more than enough to work with? The cathedral-builder Merthin, so central to the tale, is now a minor supporting character. There's a whole new story involving the king and queen. Maybe the writers had a script they wanted to use and simply inserted it here to take advantage of the name recognition of the book. Whatever the reason, this is not a very compelling story. The ending is a chaotic mess, unlike the ending of the book, which is uplifting. So, yes, a lot was changed.

Read the book, listen to the audiobook or re-visit them if you liked them. Don't watch this.

Very important: Read the book. If you don't feel like reading, listen to the audiobook. Watch this as a last resort.

So much from the novel has been omitted or altered in this adaptation that I really couldn't enjoy it. The opening scene of the book is the most powerful in it and makes the novel impossible to put down. It's not in the opening of this series though it could have been. (There are fractured flashbacks to what happened, but it's ruined.)

Yes, the book is very long, but it could have supported a longer series. There is plenty of intrigue and suspense in every chapter to sustain interest, no risk of viewer boredom. There are terrible shows that run for many seasons. Why limit this amazing novel to an eight episode adaptation? The result is major omissions and oversimplifications, with much shallower plotting and characterization.

I watched mainly because I had read the novel a while ago and wanted to refresh my memory before plunging into a new Ken Follett novel in this series. The novels can be read independently, but I just thought I should remind myself of some of the story before continuing on. Now that I've done it, I'm sorry I spent the time watching this. What a lost opportunity for a great TV series!

My expectations for this were low, but I was surprised at how bad it was. I expected a harmless, mindless Guy Ritchie retelling of the story of King Arthur, or at least the early part of the story. What I got was a weird mashup of Game of Thrones, the Lord of the Rings, and maybe even Jurassic Park, considering that giant mammoths are involved and a few pterodactyls in one scene.

Wokeness, as usual, forces insane changes in the story line. Instead of being raised by Merlin, Arthur is raised by prostitutes and protected by a) a spunky young woman and b) a fierce black African man. To say more here would be a spoiler alert, except that it's the screenwriters who already spoiled a good story. I can barely even summarize this film to myself, since it was so disjointed and messy.

Even the sets don't look anything like medieval England and belong to some strange, feminist, racially diverse, science fiction/fantasy alternative universe. So this move is just an attempt to use a known name (King Arthur) to sell something completely unrelated (a woke, incoherent CGI-filled sci-fi film). I really like Guy Ritchie films usually, but this one, whatever it is called, is no better than a 3 on a scale of 10.

Imagine an Agatha Christie in which the detectives and the suspects are all dimwitted and just keep getting dimmer, some of their dim behavior telegraphed far in advance. I realize it's supposed to be a comedy, and the characters do all make sitcom-level sophomoric, glib quips in between acts of imbecility, but it's not that funny to grownups. It's fitting that the afterparty is held after a high school reunion, because it feels like the writers who created this went straight from high school to a Los Angeles screenwriting class. I've made it through a few episodes but am having trouble continuing on. If this were a straight mystery, I would want to know whodunnit. With this show, I'm not sure I care who did it, and I'm not enjoying the comedic journey to find out..

This started with a decent premise -- a mom/school teacher leading a pleasant, suburban life but hiding a dark and violent past. As the plot unfolded in the midst of cocktail parties and after-school activities, it reminded me a bit of a Harlan Coben mini-series. But after a few episodes, the level of gun play and martial arts fighting rose to video game levels. Some characters are impossible to kill, no matter how many bullets hit them; too many others are simply expendable. The first few episodes drew me in enough to make me finish watching this series, but overall it was ridiculous and watching it probably made me dumber. The beautiful scenery and charismatic cast didn't save it.

There's a lot that is good about this series. Beautiful period costumes and settings, appealing actors, and a touch of humor. I like the fact that it's one crime per episode. (Unless a series is really amazing, it is rarely worth waiting 10 or 12 episodes for closure.) Some of the plots suffer from compression, and there are too many spontaneous confessions, but I still prefer to be able to watch an episode or two at a time.

I don't love the modern soundtrack, and the frequent sex scenes are implausible. I suppose it's supposed to seem rebellious, but it's often silly. There are are echoes of other shows, e.g. Enola Holmes, Miss Scarlet and the Duke, so if you liked those, you might like this.

My biggest problem is the heavy-handed repetition of the obvious fact that women in the 19th Century were treated abominably. Yes, we get it, and the real life story of Lidia Poet is a particularly disturbing example. Unfortunately, the theme of incredibly stupid men stopping a plucky woman from solving crimes is repeated in episode after episode after episode, and it grows wearying. The men are too dimwitted, their mistakes too obvious. There are lots of 19th Century dramas that capture the unequal treatment of women without being this exasperating. More nuance would have helped.

This is a really grim look at life among radicalized Muslims, combined with a gripping story about a terrorist plot. The fact that there have been well-known cases of Western teenage girls becoming ISIS brides makes this fictional story especially harrowing. The two different tracks of the series -- the radicalization of the girls and the effort to thwart the terrorism -- are both compelling, though it's the story of the teenagers that makes this a unique series.

As with Fauda, the scenes of daily life among the terrorists seem harsh but realistic. Apart from the the squalor, there is constant fear of brutal Isis punishments--whipping, dismemberment, execution--and drone attacks. I didn't want to feel sympathy for anyone belonging to a group that beheads people, but it was hard not to feel for Pervin, the young mother trying to escape Raqqa with her daughter.

There is barely a moment of relief from the tension, desperation and dread, so it's not always easy to watch, but it's hard not to want to see the next episode. I am surprised there is no Season 2, but maybe it's just as well that the writers didn't drag out a series that worked extremely well.

The whole show seems meant for teenagers, but it would be nice if didn't sound like it was written by teenagers.

Words and pronunciation are secondary to special effects. The past tense of "slay" is "slew," not "slayed," so when The Mandalorian gets it wrong, he sounds like a fourth grader in a school play. A stand-up comic can say, "I slayed 'em at the Laugh Shack" but in formal English no. And The Mandalorian is trying to sound formal.

Or in another scene when an actor says that there are hidden food caches. Except he pronounces it as if it's "cachet," a completely different word. These are just two minor examples of bad writing and acting that could easily be fixed--and would have been, if the errors had involved special effects instead of dialogue.

There were real opportunities for the writers to say more about The Mandalorian creed, but instead there's a lot of silly drama about never, ever, ever taking off a helmet. Maybe the helmets saved time and money-- yuo don't see the actors' faces most of the time-- leaving more resources for CGI.

It's okay for what it is, but you may be less intelligent after watching it.

As others have noted, it's hard to think of an element of this show that is not a cliche -- the detective who had a breakdown because he lost his wife, the boss who wants him off the case, the woke female partner, the bartender who consoles him over single malts, the extremely bad jazz playing mournfully in the background.

I'm trying to think of an ounce of wit, a memorable line, an unusual plot development, or anything that would redeem this. The only thing that makes it different from many other, much better shows, is that in this one Adrian Dunbar sings. It doesn't make the show much worse, but it's tacky and certainly not a plus. It's just one more reason to fast forward or skip this altogether.

This film seems to be trying to join the ranks of House of Games, The Spanish Prisoner, Nine Queens, and other twisty con man movies, but it fails on several levels. None of the cons in this film are even remotely convincing or even original. I have received phony e-mails from Nigerian princes that are more compelling. In a couple of cases, the con victims seem to almost con themselves, and some of these victims are themselves con artists who would certainly know better. When the home viewer is not taken in by a single thing, the movie ends up having no "twists." You just have to watch and wait for the characters to realize the obvious.

There are numerous other absurdities. The billionaire family in this film is profoundly unconvincing. One low-life grifter--a parolee/heroin addict turned suave imposter--is just not plausible (hard to go into detail without spoilers.) John Lithgow and the character playing his son don't seem likely to be related at all, so there is just some very poor casting there. Julianne Moore is wasted, and her supposedly savvy character behaves so stupidly in a key scene that it basically ruins the movie.

I could go on with minor additional flaws in continuity, casting, locations etc, but there is no point. I like a good caper or con man movie and gave this film every chance, but the final "con" was the most absurd and deeply unsatisfying of all. Four stars is a very generous rating.

I enjoyed Midsummer Murders in the past not because it was realistic but because it wasn't -- it offered a world of charming villages, quirky events (fetes on the village green, druid meetings in the woods), and bizarre crimes in which the victims and suspects are generally adorned in Barbour and Harris tweed.

I don't watch to see political arguments and Twitter controversies acted out in the British countryside. I knew I was in trouble with this episode when, one minute in, a drag queen struck a pose that highlighted his/her/their underarm hair. Was I " triggered"? No, though I did spend a moment trying to add up the number of interest groups and fetishists that scene pandered to.

As with other recent episodes, this show is abandoning its roots and its core appeal--macabre crimes committed in idyllic settings--and creating just another crime show highlighting contemporary social issues "ripped from the headlines." Call it Law & Order: Midsummer.

I'm a longtime fan, but all signs point to this show changing to the point where it is no longer recognizable or worth watching.