Eric Lescarbeau

The thing I really enjoy about this series is that it makes you sympathize with Sheila Rubin while simultaneously despising her at the same time. I started watching it because I like Rose Byrne as an actor and I gotta say she just absolutely nails this one. The hard part about watching this show is that you literally have to live inside Sheila Rubin's mental illness with many scenes completely dominated by her inner voice narrating in a constant barrage of negative self-talk, self-loathing and suppressed rage. I grew up with a schizophrenic mother who was constantly muttering away to the voices in her head and this felt like a very accurate representation of what it's like to live with that. It is a brutal kind of torture to have to be plagued by these voices and have literally no way to escape them. I also really like the fact that the voices she hears also expresses so clearly the psychosis of the upper-middle class and their obsession with money, success and appearances. No one in Sheila's life is spared. You can't separate her childhood trauma, her class upbringing and her mental illness from her often ruthless behavior. They're all the same person. The one thing that would have been nice to see in the show is a bit more of a counterpoint to Sheila in the form of someone with an eating disorder who isn't a terrible human being to boot. Mental illness and power do make scary bedfellows but most mentally ill people don't enjoy the latter. It would be nice to see a path to liberation that doesn't involve stepping on anyone who gets in your way.

The series looks cool and I like that I can be immersed in the mythology of another culture (Filipino) but unfortunately the writing and direction are pretty weak. Rather than taking the time to establish characters and the world we're stepping into, the first episode feels like you tuned into the middle of the series. With a very perfunctory bit of explication the show is off to the races with a lead that we've had no chance to establish any kind of a connection to and who seems emotionally flat. There's also no real effort to establish any kind of an atmosphere. Although there's some real color to the diverse underworld, we're not really given a chance to be horrified by anything, which seems essential for an anime in the horror genre. Things just move too quickly without taking the time to let it all sink in. The show's creators could learn a lot by watching Neflix's most successful anime to date (which also happens to be in the Horror genre), "Castlevania".

I was completely absorbed by this series. If you like a slow but high intensity burn then this is the crime drama for you. This was very much in the vein of The Killing in the way that it connects the personal tragedies that unfold around the killing of a child with broader social and political issues. However this series I believe is more compelling as it emphasizes much more heavily highly relevant themes of police violence and racism towards African Americans and issues that brought the BLM movement to the streets. The writing and acting were both superb all around but I think the story of how Brenton Butler's death impacts his parents (Regina King and Russel Hornsby) was really what made this show a must see. The chemistry between Clare Hope Ashitey and Michael Mosey as partners investigating the crime is also engaging. It is no small tragedy that this series was cancelled after the first season (compare to The Killing's 3.5 seasons where the main protagonists are pretty much all white and the themes were not so controversial) but I suspect and hope that we'll be seeing more from Veena Sud in the not too distant future. Yes, she has a formula, but it works without being predictable or repetitive. Her characters are intensely real, relatable and believable.