Critic Reviews

The strength of the cast and the engaging storytelling help mitigate the fact that we spend very little time with these people. Any one of these stories could sustain an entire series, and in some ways the show might have been better for it. But thanks to great performances (from a largely British cast playing Americans) including Sarah Snook, Kingsley Ben-Adir, David Costabile, Sonya Cassidy, Charlie Heaton, Malin Akerman, Bill Skarsgård, and Betsy Brandt, it’s easy to become immediately invested in each new story—though leaving them behind is more of a challenge.

Across six bittersweet vignettes, it adds up to a wryly intelligent treatise on the nature of true love and how we find it.

The six-episode run makes clear that the format offers a vast array of storytelling possibilities, built around the tantalizing promise of better dating through science, with all the cautionary warnings that entails.

There are strong performances from an array of prestige TV’s familiar faces — Malin Akerman and David Costabile of “Billions,” Charlie Heaton of “Stranger Things” and Betsy Brandt of “Breaking Bad,” among them — but the show lapses into the predictable pace of similar anthology series, where the ideas are many but the results are not always captivating. Still, “Soulmates” is a nifty enough show for AMC to serve from its pandemic cupboard.

Soulmates boasts a ton of great actors putting in fine performances, but you may want to look at the episode descriptions first before plowing forward. There are some that we think will be way more satisfying than others.

There’s definitely something in a programme about data-matched soulmates. But it’s hard to believe this uneven offering is The One.

So many of the characters in “Soulmates” are looking for trust. That search would mean more if the show around them had a little bit more of it.

The chapters that work best, by a mile, are the ones that remain as firmly grounded in reality as a futuristic series can. ... The ensuing [first] hour, anchored by a terrific Snook performance, is painful and revealing, finding pockets of devastating insight tucked away in the dark corners. ... From there, “Soulmates” gets more lost in the weeds of its ambition.

Soulmates feels like neither an indictment nor a celebration of the concept of predestined lovers, but rather a cluster of underdeveloped ideas loosely held together by it.

“Soulmates” tells some of the stories one might immediately expect from the premise, and one or two which feel far more original. But despite the promise of those episodes which fall into the latter category, and despite the uniformly excellent acting (just wait ‘til you read the cast list), it’s hard not to walk away feeling as if you’ve spent hours watching the writers attempt to free themselves from their pitch.