It came out yesterday , 10 episodes that are 30 minutes each. Julia Roberts stars. It’s called a psych thriller. She is a former counselor at a center to help Army vets after they leave the Army. Only saw the first episode and it was pretty slow . Reviews are good.
Nobody else watched it ? I would think Julia Roberts would be a big draw
I liked it quite a bit
I will probably watch 1 or 2 episodes a week. I don’t do the binge stuff. I wonder why they decided to make ten 30 minute episodes rather than 5 episodes that are 1 hour each.
I hadn’t known beforehand that it was going to be 30 min. I was just getting into the first one and the end credits came on. It was kind of disorienting.
Speaking of end credits, has anyone noticed anything “important” going on during them? For instance, the episode - I think it was 2- that ends with Shrier pacing around his room after they moved Cruz. I was halfway expecting to see him cut his own wrists with the spring on the bottom of the cot or bang his head on the desk like Cruz had mentioned earlier. As far as I could tell it was just him agitated and walking around, which was really disturbing and said itself. Usually I wouldn’t watch the credits but I keep thinking there are clues hidden in there or something.
I may check it out,but not into that 30 minute format unless we are talking about cartoon. Then again who knows maybe I will like it.
Can you explain? I mean, all the eps are available so the only difference is that you have to watch / skip the closing credits. Not challenging you; just wondering.
Enjoyed the podcast (for the most part) with Catherine Keener, Oscar Isaac, and David Schwimmer. Don’t much care for Julia Roberts, so I’ll pass. I am glad to see it was expanded. Hopefully it’ll encourage more high-quality radio dramas.
I have similar concerns about the length. 30-minute episodes of anything have a distinctly different pacing and tone compared to 60-minute episodes.
I can think of several dramatic 30-minute shows, most of which are dramedies (ugh, hate that term) like Nurse Jackie, Smilf, Kidding, etc… and the pacing is very different compared to, say, Shameless, Ray Donovan, etc… To dig deeper into those examples, Shameless and Smilf are essentially the same show with the same setting and even the same main character, but the 30-minute pacing helps to make Smilf feel much slighter than Shameless.
Imagine Game of Thrones as 30-minute episodes. You wouldn’t end up with just twice as many episodes, each one cut in half. Each episode needs its own beginning, middle and end, and so the structure becomes more fragmented.
On further reflection, I can think of several 30-minute shows with depth and no pacing issues – Atlanta, Insecure, Louie, Better Things – so maybe my concerns are unfounded. None of them are airing now so they weren’t on my mind, but there is dramatic greatness in all of those shows.
Bumping this thread because I just got finished watching it. Can’t say I liked it very much. I’ll explain why.
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It expects us to have emotional investment in characters but gives us no reason to care about the characters. Because…
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The whole thing is cloaked in a huge veil of vagueness and secrecy…almost every scene is one cryptic conversation after another, full of ambiguity, for the sake of ambiguity. The show creators are trying to hit the audience over the head with “Mystery! Intrigue!” but since this precludes the characters talking and interacting like normal human beings, they come off as really one-dimensional.
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They clearly wanted to make some kind of statement about war and the military (though I don’t know exactly what it is)…but there’s really no sense of world-building with the veterans and their connection to their military experiences. Real veterans would be making frequent references to specific details of their military service, throwing around lots of acronyms and jargon, that creates a sense of immersion. Did the show creators not have consultants to fill them in on how these guys talk?
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The whole “human test subjects in some kind of clandestine government project” plot is played out to begin with, and this show didn’t add anything new or interesting to it.
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There was zero comic relief. Any good series, even one that’s dark and cryptic, has a sprinkling of it here and there.
I feel like the whole thing was just a vehicle for showing lots of closeups of Julia Roberts’ face looking very pensive and deep, and set designers and camera crew to practice shot-framing.
After Black Mirror, my standards for “dramatic psychological thriller with futuristic overtones” were raised too high for me to be able to get into a show like this.
The government IG guy tripped on that bike in that one scene 
I agree with you. It wasn’t that good. The build up to “great conspiracy” was just memory blocking drugs. Big whoop. Not sure why that would even need to be a secret.
We watched last week. It was fairly good. (Of course we just came off of the 1st season of Patriot so it wouldn’t take much to do better than that.)
The weirdness of narrow screen for the future (not past) stuff was off-putting but at least helpful. Shows need to do a better job when jumping around in time.
One problem is that one can’t help thinking “Oh, he’s the bad guy.” the second Bobby Cannavale appears on screen. (Okay, he wasn’t the bad guy in Danny Collins.)
Speaking of Boardwalk Empire: Eli!
I’m still wowed by Sissy Spacek, even in such a small role.
The story seems complete (with some secondary loose ends). But there’s apparently going to be a second season. (It was actually ordered for 2 seasons early.)
I wonder if the first name of the company head is “Don”. Yeah, “Geiss/Geist” but still …
I felt this suffered from “streaming bloat,” so much so that it could be the poster child for it. The first 2 or 3 episodes were meh, then 3 or 4 episodes in the middle had me on the edge of my seat, then the last few episodes were completely deflated once the mystery gets explained somewhere in episode 6 or 7.
Really, I would have absolutely loved this as a feature film, somewhere between 90 minutes and 2 hours. As a 5-hour show it was only okay.
As I understood the plot, it wasn’t the government at all, but rather a private corporation doing testing on volunteers and then pitching/selling their program to the government. Shea Whigham was the only government representative in the whole thing, and he was largely powerless to do anything meaningful.
OK, you’ve got me there, you’re right about the company being a private company. You’re right about everything else too. There were indeed a few episodes midway through the season that DID have me wanting to watch the next one…“hmm, what the hell is going on here!” The problem is that the payoff wasn’t good enough.
The shame of it is that it could have been really interesting if it was done right. People trapped in a vast Orwellian bureaucracy where they’re never certain who they’re answering to or what is going to happen next = interesting setting. Veterans struggling with issues and people trying to help them = interesting setting. The potential was there. The world-building just wasn’t. It doesn’t matter how good the acting was, if I didn’t give a shit what they were talking about.