I know Down Cemetary Road is written by the same person as Slow Horses, but it feels like they put it into chatGPT to adapt it for TV. The acting is bad, the characters are worse. If you close your eyes and stuff cotton in your ears you won’t be able to tell any difference between Emma Thompson’s delivery and Gary Oldman's in Slow Horses, it’s the same rhythm and tone, but the acid doesn’t really land coming from Emma Thompson. Slow Horses works bc all of the actors and characters are multidimensional, sharp and funny, not so on Down Cemetery Road.
Wigwam’s character and the actress playing her are particularly superficial. Joe’s grieving mom was horrible. All the fake-crying from all the characters is awkward to watch. None of the characters are seem real enough for me to care about any of them. (Also what is going on with AppleTV lately? They are churning out garbage and reviewers are really over hyping it).
Speaking of garbage: the sets look cartoonish. The books and shelving behind Joes desk are clearly a flat 2D print or greenscreen. The street where Sarah lives is so fake, I keep expecting Oscar the Grouch to pop out of a can. It seems like they spent more on the CGI for the intro than they did for actual sets.
It seems like casting tried to appeal to MAGA and appear less-woke by making all the minority-played characters either dumb or villains. Then again, all the characters are dumb, so it’s hard to tell. How many more times are they going to use the joke where Sarah doesn’t want to name their race, or their hairstyle. And then Zoe has to call her out and explain the joke, as if we didn’t understand it the two times before.
That’s what really annoys me, bad writing treats the audience like we’re idiots and need everything reallllly spelled out. Like, we get it, they live on a kooky bohemian University street, we don’t need chickens and flags and pallets and tiny cars, where even the trash looks freshly painted and gentrified.
The more I think about this, and put it in writing, the angrier I’m getting, and the more I realize I really hate this show.