Tales From the Loop

Tales from the Loop is that rare sci-fi show: one that trusts us to breathe in deep the oddities of its world, accept that we aren’t going to know everything, and climb aboard anyways. That trust, built with its tactful scene-setting and human-sized troubles, allows for easy investment in deceivingly simple dramas. If the rest of the episodes are as touching, moving, and casually engaging as what I’ve seen from The Loop, Amazon already has one of the year’s sharpest pieces of sci-fi.

Halpern writes every episode of this first season and has a gift for keying into the eerie beauty of Stålenhag's visuals and finding stories that match their disquieting melancholy. "Loop" sets the tone.

Episodic anthologies often struggle to replicate audience expectancy; that drive you feel to see what happens next. The sci-fi genre often uses extraordinary outward events to look inward. “Tales From the Loop” does the latter very well, but still struggles with the former; while it’s nice not to feel like you have to keep watching to solve the mystery, more urgency could help the series carry a more lasting impact. There’s a lot of beauty in this loop, for those curious enough to seek it out.

While it can’t maintain the magnetically-charged voltage of its initial sprint, it can be quite enchanting.

Nobody would accuse Tales from the Loop of being gripping, but it has other qualities, rare in a frenetic era: it is thoughtful, patient, and unafraid to leave its Big Questions open-ended. This is slow television for slow days, and for all the viewers who switch off after 10 minutes worried they are slipping into a coma, there will be others for whom this is a curious joy.

Tales From The Loop feels like something that should be hung on a wall, admired and interpreted rather than a show that a viewer can lean in, watch, and get involved in.

In all, the Loop has a striking look, but its stories — at least over the course of the three episodes sent to critics — are a bit too laconically told to justify the sit.

There are certain shows that come on the air and you're like... yeah... that just moved television forward. TWIN PEAKS was such a show. This leaves Peaks in its dust. Not at all pretentious, completely accessible. The wrong type of viewer will think nothing happens. The right type of viewer understands that EVERYTHING is happening.

As usual on here, most reviews are extremely (and unfairly) polarising, but the truth is that this show has both the good and bad mentioned by everyone, making it –in my opinion– just average. The good: very good acting, gorgeous art-direction/photography/cinematography, and a refreshingly human and slow take on sci-fi. The bad: extremely lazy writing with baffling unresolved questions and very flawed world building (gorgeous, mysterious and appealing, but frustratingly nonsensical too). In my onion it's a shallow and superficial show, a sort of melancholic "Lost": very intriguing and wants to be poetic, but has no idea where it's going or why.

I watched it purely because of the aesthetics of the robots, just to find out that they are mere McGuffins, just breed to suffer eternally. In the end, you will have cried for nothing. Poor robots...

This is what happens if you have no ideas and too much money. I stopped caring about the story and the charcters after 20 minutes.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]