“Shoresy” may have lost some of its rabid comic intensity over the years, but its ribald riffs on brotherly love can still grab your attention in unpredictable ways.
The show cuts between the two tracks metronomically, giving them roughly equal time, and there is a lot of evidence to keep track of; cellphone checkers may find themselves lost pretty quickly. What you can’t miss, however, is how the contemporary story has been conceived as histrionic soap opera. .... The early timeline, by contrast, is rational and reasonably absorbing, a straightforward (if grisly) procedural mystery that is not insultingly silly by the standards of serial-killer drama.
“Rooster” is a mess, but Carell is never less than entertaining in it. .... “Rooster” remains amorphous, though; it tries for a mix of naturalistic prestige comedy and rapid-fire, stylized sitcom and just misses both.
Superhero stories demand high stakes; playing against that, in a series whose best moments are quiet and low key, is interesting in theory but herky-jerky in practice. “Wonder Man” is consistently charming, though, when Abdul-Mateen and Kingsley are together.
His [director Daniel Syrkin's] choreography of the action, along with the overall restraint he elicits from the cast, keeps us attentive despite the extremities of the plotting and the occasional woodenness of the writing, at least in translation. The show is beginning to have an echo-chamber quality — we’ve been watching the same people in crisis in the same place for a while now — but it can still suck you in.
Wong is in the world of conventional melodrama here rather than the rarefied, allusive landscape of his films, and his touch is off. He gets the look he’s going for, but he isn’t able to maintain anything distinctive in terms of mood or tone; if the series has a tone, it’s a shiny, commercial blandness. .... It is visually enveloping, if not in a notably rich or interesting way.
“The Beast in Me” is a mystery but it tips its hand early on some major points, and shifts into a mode of grinding, violent suspense; this switch fuels a feeling of indecision that hovers over the whole production. Danes manages to give a meticulous and intelligent performance throughout; Rhys, so good at playing principled men with violent depths in “The Americans” and “Perry Mason,” doesn’t find much beyond maniacal grins in the thinly conceived Jarvis.
Most of it is executed elegantly and acted more than competently (though Adeel Akhtar pushes the obsequiousness awfully hard). There is no reason not to enjoy “Down Cemetery Road” (the title comes from a Philip Larkin poem) as a high-grade dark-comic thriller that is as consistently enjoyable as the novel, probably more so.
Its straight-ahead, old-fashioned vibe is refreshing. It harks back, in a distant way, to hard-boiled British gangster films like “Get Carter” and “Villain,” offering a whiff of that kind of grit and atmosphere.
