Life Sentence

A witty show full of attractive, well-spoken people that manages to be a feel-good series even as it remains skeptical about its being a feel-good series. It has it both ways, all the way. ... Cake is eaten, and had, too.

It’s warm and funny-adjacent but it has too much voiceover narration and doesn’t offer the emotional truths of reigning prime-time family drama champ “This is Us.”

Hale is a winning presence, all wide eyes and cute Peter Pan collars. ... The show has a handle on quick jokes and comic reaction shots. ... When the people around Stella start getting real with her about their struggles, Life Sentence struggles at finding the proper tone.

There’s almost no conflict anywhere. The show radiates likability but lacks narrative bite, which makes it vanish from one’s mind the moment the episode is over.

As the financial and emotional dominoes keep tumbling, there are only so many chuckles to be wrung from financial ruin and emotional defenestration. The show goes from morbidly funny to morbid to jagged and depressing at record speed. There are a lot of jokes in Life Sentence about patients watching "sappy cancer movies."

The performances are skilled but a bit bland overall, much like the Crate and Barrel look of the sets and lighting. For a series intent on implicitly criticizing the “romantic cancer movies,” it’s too comfortable showing its plucky heroine manifesting no physical signs of having dealt with the disease.

Life Sentence has an off-putting preciousness to it while grinding through one “crisis” after another. It doesn’t earn any sympathies because its principal characters don’t merit much more than one big “Oh, shaddup!” With the exception, perhaps, of poor Wes.