House of Ashur’s surface-level outrageousness shouldn’t be mistaken for laziness or sloppiness. On the contrary, it’s undergirded by surprisingly sturdy storytelling.
For now, however, these children remain frozen in time and space, unable to move past our nostalgic memories of the people they once were. It’s just as well that Vecna’s curse is coming to an end sooner rather than later. It’s time to let these adolescents do as adolescents are meant to do: grow up and move on with the rest of their lives.
It’s as hollow as the smiling villain at its center. What we are left with, in the absence of any compelling point, is a string of events to watch transpire between several people who are neither likable nor particularly interesting.
Stumble’s best efforts, however, are strained. Instead of a warm, easy time, it delivers a string of sweaty jokes that are mostly either too obvious or too random and only rarely actually funny, punctuated by sudden swerves into earnest uplift.
Like any mystery worth its salt, All Her Fault does eventually get to a point where we know everything there is to know, and exactly where to place our blame. Its touch of savvy is understanding how easily blame can be dropped on some people or deflected by others, and why we’re so eager to cast it in the first place.
These characters are so thin, their storylines so flimsy and their motives so underbaked that there’s no recognizable emotion underlying any of it, and thus no feeling to be provoked by watching it. You might as well be looking at random GIFs from some show you’ve never seen before.
The HBO comedy bursts out the gate with the look-at-me dazzle of a star in waiting; much like an actual Angeleno, it’s got surprising depths waiting to be discovered. It’s just that to get there, you have to sit through a string of fitfully charming, frequently exhausting misadventures first.
The twists and turns and red herrings and dropped subplots do lead, eventually, to a pretty good finale, with a grand reveal that’s everything you hope one will be — elegant yet surprising, linking together several seemingly disparate threads while shaking up the board in ways that could pay off in seasons to come. It’s just that by then, even that feels like too little, too late. With plenty of plot potential but too few characters actually worth giving a damn about, Talamasca fails to conjure any lasting magic.
Creators Michael D. Fuller and Erin Lee Carr are, instead, most interested in how the Murdaughs found themselves here to begin with — specifically, in the toxic combination of privilege and desperation that propelled them. But if their exploration of that theme is thoughtful and thorough, it’s also one that, over eight moderately watchable hours, sticks to familiar territory rather than blazing new ground.
DMV is only okay most of the time. But should it settle into a more comfortable groove over its journey, it has the potential to turn, eventually, into a fun ride.
