Red Widow

It’s entertaining and engrossing.

Only Visnjic, immaculately groomed and vaguely continental, seems to understand that this over-the-top story requires not only a constant flame to boil the plot but a flirtatious sense of fun. [11 Mar 2013, p.45]

Yet, for all its exciting twists, Red Widow recycles too many gangster-movie cliches.

All told, there's enough here to stick around a little while, but this is one of those premises almost designed to strain plausibility over time.

The odds are better that viewers will see Red Widow as a formula series trying desperately not to be a formula series. In the process, it's not very exciting. Or compelling.

[Red Widow] threatens to box its characters into a dead-end world from which viewers see no escape.

Red Widow feels focus-grouped and dramatically scattered. All of the show's characters, right down to Marta's Russian mob-boss father (Rade Šerbedžija) are so clichéd that the episodes begin to feel like dramatizations of TV Tropes entries.