Joan

As most Netflix documentaries, this one is too long and could be condensed to half or one-third. The debate of guilty is totally one-sided. A neighbor woman said she stopped talking with the suspect's family because the latter hinted some feng-shei issue about a well. That's totally irrelevant to the murder. But even the defense lawyer's argument is not very strong. What happened to the suspect's new husband? Is he still standing by her? So many deaths seems suspicious. But perhaps Indians use cyanide more often than they realize. They wear a lot of 24 karat gold jewelry. Do they use cleaning agent that contains cyanide to clean it?

Weak stories. Funniness totally depends on slapstick. The 'funny' events are usually stupid and unbelievable. E.g. Monk mistakes a porta potty as a phone booth, stays in for 2 minutes, and puts a quarter (in the toilet?) Another example. Monk can't resist the urge to straighten out an extremely hot light fixture and burned his fingers, although his assistant tries to pull him away by wrestling with him. And Monk has no consideration for others. He uses hundreds bottle of drinking water belonging to his host for a bath when there was a water outage. He packages garbage in boxes and mail them to any address he can find (and it happens to be his psychiatrist's home), to avoid garbage pile-up in his own apartment during a garbage men's strike. It's hard to find things about the show to like. The actors' talent are wasted by the badly written scripts.

Ridiculous plot, cliche dialog, unlikely events, e.g., a car plunged into the oceans and the driver and passenger ended with a good swim. Kiraz was sold to Peyami's family to marry Mustafa so she could produce a child. She failed her mission but fell in love with Mustafa for his childlike nature. Then she was kicked out because Mistafa's mother did not like the way she loved him. But after she left, she found herself to be pregnant. Yet in the how multiple foreshadows suggested that she had got pregnant from another man and wanted to pretend the child was Mustafa's. On Dimitri's wedding Peyami and his new girlfriend sneaked out to have wild sex while he could watch his beloved Esvet getting married. I did watch 2 seasons. What a waste of time. I can't believe they are making season3. I definitely will skip it.

The main theme is women, homosexual sex and gender confusion. The protagonist Jean, a beautiful behavioral therapist in her 40's, is a dotted mother of a nine year old daughter Dolly who wants to be a boy. And Jean, although madly in love with her husband Michael and enjoys frequent and passionate sex with him, also lusts for a young bisexual woman, Sydney, the obsession of her patient Sam. Jean is so devoted to her patients that she gets involved in their lives: e.g., inviting a young drug addict, Allyson, to stay in her apartment, and faking a letter to another patient in the name of her daughter, Rebecca. Jean happen to know Rebecca after they met in a high end beauty salon. Rebecca does not seem to have a job but has her own apartment, perhaps paid by her mother. Sick of 'taking care of' her controlling mother, Rebecca moves out of her apartment without telling her mother, into a commune, and invites Jean to dinner in the commune, to show her how to live in harmony with so little interest in materialism. (Notice the un-materialistic Rebecca goes to beauty salon regularly to to pamper her lustrous long locks.) Allison and Jean have similar situation, enjoying their mother's money but also resenting them. It seems that the writer Lisa Rubin wants to glorify the young women' (Jean is young at heart) brevity, independence, adventure, and honesty. But I found Jean, Sydney, Allyson, Rebecca and Dolly, reckless, indulgent, Narcissistic, and unlikable. The writing is bad. Episode 6 - the sex/seduction between Jean and Sydney, and between Michael and his secretary, is so boring that I kept checking how much longer it would last.