Critic Reviews

When We Rise is an enriching, bonafide TV event of the first order and also powerful enough to change more than a few entrenched minds.

Quality performances and tender direction save When We Rise from perhaps its most glaring executional weakness, explain-y dialogue that’s beholden to teaching history and expressing policy debates.

Though the star power doesn’t arrive until the last two episodes, it’s the first half of When We Rise that is riveting. The early years are passionate and filled with urgency, mirroring the excitement and promise of an era still basking in the glow of the optimistic ’60s.

It’s as lively as it is poignant, and at its best when it’s demonstrating how the personal and the political can overlap, and how they can come into conflict.

When We Rise doesn’t pick up a story at its beginning and doesn’t leave a story with an ending. What it delivers is a game-changing saga from the middle.

A sprawling look at the gay liberation movement in the U.S. during the past five decades, spread over eight hours, featuring an abundance of talent, occasionally too earnest, at times heartbreaking, and pretty much always eminently watchable.

[The first two installments] are Rise's best, most concise episodes, yet even they try to do too much, falling prey to an "and then this happened" narrative, a slew of distracting (and often badly bewigged) cameos and a rushed pace that is particularly ill-suited to the segment on the AIDS crisis.

[A] sprawling narrative that loses urgency the longer it goes on, but not relevance.

Rise is at its most striking as the real-life characters awaken to their sexuality and purpose, and crushingly sad when dramatizing the devastation of AIDS. [27 Feb - 5 Mar 2017, p.16]

It would have helped, perhaps, if the production wasn’t so drawn out, but rather condensed to a tightly assembled, one-night TV-movie. But at its best, When We Rise achieves the inspirational status it desires, and goes beyond that, to portray the romanticism of rebellion as an exhilarating, desirable goal.