Will

The dialogue ripples with sly and subtle references to plays and immortal lines our young country bumpkin will create in future years. ... [Laurie] Davidson is magnetic. You watch this guy with near certainty that you’re watching a new star. But his is only one of several extraordinary performances.

Will is as sensual as it is suspenseful, as bawdy as it is bloody, as lusty as it it is lyrical.

It’s also a lot of fun, lively and fast-paced, with comedy, tragedy, action and history, just as audiences of 1589, and today, demand.

Will is fun, like a supercharged “Shakespeare in Love,” but the regalia, pacing, and dazzling colors often seem like compensations for a somewhat obvious and awkwardly expository script.

As long as Will is having lively fun with the absurdity of its premise, the show is entertainingly dumb, but by the third and fourth episodes sent to critics, that commitment has lapsed into something much blander.

These opening episodes of Will heave with style at the expense of soul or substance. The real tension of the overall plot doesn’t kick in until the fourth episode, but before that the audience isn’t presented much to hang onto besides a surge of dirty, pretty visuals--and those baubles can only carry a story so far.

It's chaotic, sometimes almost incoherent. Wildly inconsistent, it veers from dark drama to lighthearted fun.