Note: Spoilers start in paragraph 6 and last until the end of my review
My title tells you everything you need to know.
I will say the acting is good, and it's easily one of Steve Carell's best performances. Domnhall Gleeson (is that how you spell it?) Was really great as well. No matter how boring or repetitive the show became, they still held it up.
The show's first few episodes are great too. It does a good job setting up its story and making it intriguing. However, after episode 5 this goes away and loses its momentum and intrigue almost entirely.
The issue is that the show is just too long. This never needed to be 10 episodes, it easily could've been 8. Back to episode 5, once that episode ends theres really not much else they can do in the show other than end it, but instead they stretch the story to its breaking point, filling in the blanks of episodes 6-9 with essentially nothing. Hell every episode has a 10-40 second scene where we are just watching Strauss sit on the bed while Sam is peeing in another room.
6-9 are basically all the same. Dr. Strauss contemplates issues in his life that we've already been through countless times, Sam tries to control his urge to kill again, and that's it. They try to do a little more in these episodes with the story, but it still has no impact on the story overall so it ends up being meaningless. These extra episodes just drag on and on to the point where I almost stopped caring about the show.
The worst part of this show is that the ending makes Dr. Strauss' arc through the entire series meaningless. We are shown all this depth in his character and his relationship with his family, his determination to make things better, just for him to be killed at the end??? So all we have been watching the show build up suddenly crumbles to the ground.
The way dies is out of character as well. Throughout the series, we see Strauss think through several ways he can escape and every time he comes to the same conclusion, he is too old and weak to fight Sam and win, so he can only escape by being smart or by "curing" Sam. However, his solution to escaping in the final episode is threatening to kill Sam's mother, which he knew wouldn't work and would cause him to die. In episode 9, Strauss almost tried the exact same thing but didnt because he knew it would get him killed! Obviously he was desperate to escape but it still doesn't justify randomly switching up his character and the story. It's like the writers forgot what they were doing. Either that or they couldn't think of any other way to end it, which wouldnt suprise me.
Killing Dr. Strauss isn't even the main issue here, it's that the death came from nowhere and happened because Strauss acted completely out of character from what we've seen. It's so frustrating that it brings the shows quality down with it
Overall, this show starts great but gets worse with each episode to the point where at the end you'll probably be upset you wasted all this time on it. It has strong acting but it's not enough to justify anything else. It's too long for it's own good and ruins itself with its ending.
My title tells you everything you need to know.
I will say the acting is good, and it's easily one of Steve Carell's best performances. Domnhall Gleeson (is that how you spell it?) Was really great as well. No matter how boring or repetitive the show became, they still held it up.
The show's first few episodes are great too. It does a good job setting up its story and making it intriguing. However, after episode 5 this goes away and loses its momentum and intrigue almost entirely.
The issue is that the show is just too long. This never needed to be 10 episodes, it easily could've been 8. Back to episode 5, once that episode ends theres really not much else they can do in the show other than end it, but instead they stretch the story to its breaking point, filling in the blanks of episodes 6-9 with essentially nothing. Hell every episode has a 10-40 second scene where we are just watching Strauss sit on the bed while Sam is peeing in another room.
6-9 are basically all the same. Dr. Strauss contemplates issues in his life that we've already been through countless times, Sam tries to control his urge to kill again, and that's it. They try to do a little more in these episodes with the story, but it still has no impact on the story overall so it ends up being meaningless. These extra episodes just drag on and on to the point where I almost stopped caring about the show.
The worst part of this show is that the ending makes Dr. Strauss' arc through the entire series meaningless. We are shown all this depth in his character and his relationship with his family, his determination to make things better, just for him to be killed at the end??? So all we have been watching the show build up suddenly crumbles to the ground.
The way dies is out of character as well. Throughout the series, we see Strauss think through several ways he can escape and every time he comes to the same conclusion, he is too old and weak to fight Sam and win, so he can only escape by being smart or by "curing" Sam. However, his solution to escaping in the final episode is threatening to kill Sam's mother, which he knew wouldn't work and would cause him to die. In episode 9, Strauss almost tried the exact same thing but didnt because he knew it would get him killed! Obviously he was desperate to escape but it still doesn't justify randomly switching up his character and the story. It's like the writers forgot what they were doing. Either that or they couldn't think of any other way to end it, which wouldnt suprise me.
Killing Dr. Strauss isn't even the main issue here, it's that the death came from nowhere and happened because Strauss acted completely out of character from what we've seen. It's so frustrating that it brings the shows quality down with it
Overall, this show starts great but gets worse with each episode to the point where at the end you'll probably be upset you wasted all this time on it. It has strong acting but it's not enough to justify anything else. It's too long for it's own good and ruins itself with its ending.