Hemlock Grove

Hemlock Grove takes its time with story lines, ensuring that each one has plenty of room to ripen. It carries out every dastardly deed with gusto, but still offers enough moments of levity.

Hemlock Grove overall falls well short of anything resembling sustained brilliance. Still, each episode may well push just enough buttons to pull you along to the next one.

What's a little messy about Hemlock Grove isn't so much the corpses as the oddly paced story and the sometimes eye-rollingly silly dialogue, which occasionally leaves a more than competent cast looking less so.

If the underlying formula is as old as “Dark Shadows,” there’s still a need for more narrative momentum than the 13-episode series initially delivers.

The writers were obviously angling for a mysterious sensibility with the supernatural aspect of the show being talked about rather than seen (ala Game of Thrones, or The Leftovers), but delivered on the backs of a weak story and weaker characters, the supernatural expounding only adds to the sluggish pacing.

An average episode of The Vampire Diaries offers more wit, surprise and true horror than this derivative amateur night of mannered, feigned fright.

Weird can be good, but this isn’t intentionally weird so much as it is plain bad.