As it stands, I have no idea whether a second season will do away with the New York City stuff and become the show I’m actually curious to keep watching, or if it will continue to be one of the most whiplash-y shows I can remember.
Imperfect Women isn’t the worst entry in television’s most exhausted genre, but it arrives so late in the genre’s lifespan that its generic blandness feels more offensive than jagged ineptitude.
The season picks up with a home stretch that’s characterized more by cynicism and looming threats than anything overt, setting up promising storylines for what I hope will be future installments.
As much as I was or wasn’t entertained by Scarpetta as a TV show — it’s got some good adaptive ideas and some predictable ghoulish flaws — I’ll be curious to see if its audience is prone to flexibility.
It’s a show with an excess of underdeveloped identities, rather than a lack of identity, spackling over its poorly fused story elements with a sense of humor that’s sometimes appealing and frequently desperately hacky.
This Sherlock is smart and periodically mopey, but he isn’t a compelling character on any level. .... The middle of the season isn’t just dumb, it’s dull and overextended. But then the show picks up again for the last two episodes, which hop around the globe, feature various twists and come close to salvaging the rest of the series.
The opening hours, presented in more comedic terms, are a little funny, but not in a way that left me demonstrably laughing. The next two hours, presented in more dramatic terms, are humane, but not in a way that quite reaches poignancy.
There’s no aesthetic excellence or narrative complexity to add value, and while several of the performances are sturdy, many more are underdeveloped at one end of the spectrum or ridiculously hammy at the other.
This revival isn’t a Netflix-seasons-of-Arrested-Development-level embarrassment. It’s just a museum piece: still funny in bursts, still boosted by the chemistry of the core cast, but hampered by all the elements that frequently tripped the show up in its closing seasons.
If you asked me to explain why I found it very difficult to build a connection to the show that goes deeper than “I can’t wait to see what weird ’80s thing they’ll acknowledge next,” it’s that, for all their checklist of traumas (well-summarized with gynecological specificity in the penultimate episode), none of the characters in Strip Law feel like…people.
