Still Star-Crossed

It all chugs along under the basic idea that you don’t need to have too many feelings about what’s actually happening onscreen as long as everything is beautiful to look at--until the final two minutes of the pilot, when two estranged lovers meet in an empty room.

All the familiar boxes are checked off, including the miscommunications that inevitably lead to Romeo and Juliet's deaths, but these sequences are so often scattershot, sloppily edited, or too tightly framed to make any kind of emotional impression. Buried somewhere in the middle of this is the show's actual premise.

The writing is so scattered, it’s hard to find anyone, Montague or Capulet, to root for.

What Star-Crossed can't do, at least in the early going, is provide much incentive to care about its characters, despite the appealing Anthony Head and Zuleikha Robinson as Lord and Lady Capulet, Grant Bowler as Lord Montague and Lashana Lynch as Juliet's cousin Rosalind, who gets caught in the middle of a plan to save the fair city of Verona.

While a tad short of The White Princess, the costuming and pageantry of the show is exemplary (even if some of those castle shots look lifted from Once Upon A Time), so it’s lovely to look at, but hard to follow. And harder still for it to hold your attention. Further episodes will need to amp up something--romance, intrigue, trauma--to grab the audience.

While there’s pageantry aplenty, the dialogue is littered with too many lumpy Shakespeare-lite lines and some jarring uses of slang.

If Still Star-Crossed was taken hostage by a hacker the way the way the new Pirates of the Caribbean film reportedly had been, ABC and Disney would probably break out into delighted giggles and spend the promo budget on a karaoke party for the staff.