Here and Now

Here and Now is franker, more unyielding [than NBC's This is Us] and, as a result, more suited to a tough historical moment. This show’s willingness to go for baroque, adding on oddity with gusto, recalls the best and--in moments--worst of Six Feet Under. That show’s narrative excesses, applied without real purpose, eventually fell flat. But Here and Now sets forth more confidently.

Here and Now suffers from a self-seriousness that's hard not to laugh at--for the wrong reasons. [2/9 Feb 2018, p.97]

In the first four episodes, Here and Now suffers from wanting to cover too many topics. By episode four, the characters start to become less annoying, but that's asking viewers to be patient in a world where there are hundreds of other shows to watch. The main problem, in the early going, at least, is that "Here and Now" feels less like a drama with fully developed characters than an essay on The Way We Live Now, with doomstruck observations about the difficulties of finding harmony among races, cultures, genders, and so on.

If HBO was looking for a “This Is Us” with nudity, “Here and Now” is an aimless, unsatisfying result.

Here and Now is so preoccupied with checking off representative boxes that it forgets to whip up actual drama. There's little plot, no aesthetic distinctiveness, and no sense of casualness or specificity to the series.

It’s plenty ambitious, but an ambitious failure, where the more you make like Greg and try to think about what the characters are thinking, the more unbearable most of it becomes.

It’s a domestic drama with unbelievable dialogue, which just makes it as hollow as anything I’ve seen on television in a long time. It’s a show with almost no subtlety and yet almost no plot--which is almost a feat within itself. The real tragedy is that there are beats that are likable--I enjoyed most of the growing relationship between Ramon and Henry, because it felt genuine, but so much of Here and Now does not.