Started watching it last night. Fun and everyone is doing good work. The CGI in some spots and you can occasionally feel the actors looking at tennis balls offscreen, but overall I liked it. They cast a twenty-something for Lucy, but she’s good and I get that great tween/teen actors are perhaps rare.
My wife and I watched and enjoyed it. Definitely better than it might have been, but not as good as it aspired to, if you know what I mean.
Good points:
-worldbuilding
-acting
-random minor-ish characters seeming like real three dimensional people, not stock characters
-backstory gives a reasonable excuse for why teenagers have to save the world
-relationship between the three main characters
Bad points:
-generally cheap feeling
-not as many “characters do whatever stupid thing is necessary, no matter how smart they are supposed to be, if the plot demands it” moments as some show… but far from zero
Spoilers through the end of S1: -I feel like if they’re going to keep adding more and more background mysteries (origin of the problem, Lockwood’s background, Lockwood’s secret room, mysterious symbol, golden blade guy) they should have ended S1 by resolving at least ONE of them, just to prove that they can. Otherwise it feels a bit like Lost
As far as I remember from the books, Lockwood’s parents don’t figure into it at all. I sort of dislike when they shoehorn in a personal motive. Can’t the hero just do what’s right anyway?
I thought it was fairly entertaining, but it didn’t necessarily bowl me over. To put it another way, when Lockwood opened the mysterious door at the end, I sort of wanted to know what was behind it, but I also was cool with never actually knowing. I guess I’m rooting for it. The only place online that I’ve seen ranking its renewal chances put it at 50/50, with a slight lean toward being canceled. Then again, I don’t know how anyone thinks they can figure out how Netflix makes its decisions.