Wicked City

The show's intricate plotting and its complex female characters—the desperately ambitious McClaren, the angel-faced, black-hearted Beaumontaine—make it fascinating despite its flaws.

It’s not a terrible show for fans of crime dramas but it’s not great either, occupying the same mushy middle ground as summer’s “Aquarius” on NBC.

There are potential bright spots in how creator Steven Baigelman will handle the murderous partnership of Kent and Betty in the next nine episodes, but the show’s inept edginess and dull tone resoundingly guarantee that it won’t exactly be worthwhile.

Despite noticeable efforts to play Kent and Betty as wounded, troubled people with murderously kinky bedroom predilections, Westwick and Christensen’s stunted, one-note characters seem better suited as reenactments on an Investigation Discovery true-crime program than a prime-time series.

The writing is cliched, the characters cartoonish and the action tedious, punctured by bloodshed.

It's a profoundly unnecessary, formally cloddish collection of grating cop-show cliches, antiseptically scuzzy nihilism, and just stupid, stupid stupidity, wrapped in cheap, loud nostalgia for the L.A. of the hair-metal '80s. [30 Oct 2015, p.58]

It’s violent in a dumb, done-before, tediously psychosexual way.