I decided to give the first episode a try hoping to see what the hype was all about. It starts off with a slightly pedantic opening monologue about the American dream and money which is fine coming from a financial advisor protagonist.
Though i do find it a bit annoying when characters always have some deep screenwriter fueled philosophy on why they're doing why they're doing versus the kind of "I just needed a job and I'm good at it" approach.
Some of the early exposition in the show feels like something out of a freshman screenwriting class, characters announce their relationships and statuses to each other quite a few times.
"You're my best friend"
"You've been married for 20 years"
"She's fifteen years old"
"We both make a lot of money but you drive a Camry and i live in a nice house"
It's kind of like the writers done trust the audience to pick up on anything without completely spelling it out.
The last thing that bothered me was the introduction of the Drugdealer.
He feels like every other generic gangster antagonist in a movie, has monologues that feel like something a screenwriter thought was cool versus actual authentic sounding dialogue. To make the character more threatening they have basically made him omnipotent, able to kill many people throughout the entire episode without any detection what so ever. People are shot and thrown in barrels of acid. He throws a man off the roof of a luxury hotel and i guess just magically teleports out of there before anybody on any floors see him. The show never explains how he's doing the very obvious things he's doing completely undetected.
He then forces our protagonist to uproot his entire family to the ozarks, after making him pay His entire life savings. There is no explanation why this works either.
But Jason Bateman is one of my favorite actors and he's decent here though he's playing a somewhat uninteresting character so far. I hope the show gets better because there is potential.
Review of Sugarwood
