Arsham Shafie

Lots of long reviews so let me give it to you upfront. Incredibly promising story, bafflingly horrendous casting, laughable writing, blindly put together tone and pacing, attempts at dramatization falling flat due to lack of build up and said issues with tone and to top it all off, some of the jankiest CGI you've ever seen? If you want to read along a bit more, I'll give you some context. I have not read the books but I have heard they are very interesting. The show runners, infamous as they are, did do a great job with purely adapting another iconic book series, albeit for only 6 seasons after burning it down to ash in the final two. But, even with their catastrophic failure with Game of Thrones, you would think that this can be their redemption. OH BOY IT IS NOT. To think that David and Dan will be handed another shot at running a multimillion dollar show brings me pain. Probably should find their permanent home at CW or something. The casting is akin to a 90s straight to DVD high school drama. Of course some actors pull their weight due to their natural talent and charisma, the rest are obscenely bad and not to their fault only. To think that Eiza González was cast as the leader of a company and leading scientific genius of her time is either indicative of a wild sexual fantasy from the show creators or general ignorance of what a scientist would be like in real life. An actor can do so much to portray a character. If show runners set them up for failure, they are going to embarrassingly fail, and they do. Not to pick on González, but this goes to all the "scientists" in the show. They really do seem like they just got off of the set of Perfect Match. The writing is just awful. Incredibly cheesy dialogue, interlaced with even cheesier movie scientific mumbo jumbo. So much potential could have been there for a smart show to be created. They could have even decided to keep the science to a minimum but nail the tone of the circumstances the characters find themselves in, but alas they fail in both. All in all, the story could have been nice, but is incompetently made, poorly acted and written either by an AI or a child. Maybe I'll watch the rest as background noise while I work. Could be good for that I guess.