Amazons pilot seasons allow consumers to vote for their pleasure.
This year presents them with two drama options that represent something of a taste test challenge.
You could see them as subjects in an experiment interrogating a quality of dubious significance, a likable protagonist.
Credit: Amazon
My framework is flawed.
As a measure of anything, its vulnerable to lousy biases of all sorts, including my own.
Allow to me tamper your assessments by offering by own.
Amazon Prime Video/Sony Pictures Television
But this unfocused and unappealing adaptation of Meg Wolitzers 2013 novel doesnt flatter the project.
They called themselves The Interestings.
I guess Dead Poets Society was already taken.
Amazon Prime Video/Sony Pictures Television
Jules abandoned hers altogether.
The severe criticism of a toxic acting teacher may have had something to do with it.
Whatever the explanation, she became somewhat toxic herself.
Shes a shrink of dubious merit.
One patient is desperate to break up with her.
You get the sense Jules knows this and feels moderately terrible about it.
Her other friends may or may not be all that happier.
Another major blunder is the presentation of the summer camp days that haunts the adult characters.
The kids are such broad, bland archetypes of adolescent romanticism, they foreshadow their own fall.
Theyre so damn precocious and pretentious, they even make you want it.
Does the show love these developing people or mocking them?
If the latter: why?
Jules, the shows center, suffers the most.
I suspect the make-it/break-it element for most people will be her fraught relationship with her husband.
We see her treating him abominably during their dating days.
We see her supporting him poorly in the shows present, which finds him struggling with depression.
To be fair, they have other issues, and their enmity isnt unusual.
Whenever I see him on TV, I want to adjust the parameters to black and white.
He relentlessly pushes screenwriters to create better scripts, driving them nuts but commanding their respect, too.
Monroe presents as a La La Land Don Draper, but with his self-sabotaging demons under control.
Theres more to love about Stahr!
In addition to an impeccable sense of style, he rocks a winsome widower look, too.
Could the show gild Stahrs likable lily any more?
(Actually, yes, but spoilers.)
He made you rich.
By pilots end, a storyline emerges involving the making of a highly allegorical thriller.
I want to see how it turns out.
I hope I havent seen the last of it.Grade: B+
