This is the weirdest damn show…
I’m not finished with the series yet. I’m currently on Episode 7. Everybody sees a different invisible person. Lucky’s trauma is horrific, but this whole family is fucked up beyond recognition. Please don’t spoil me on the ending.
Ok, I’m done now! And the ending explains a lot!
It was so creepy, and over the top with the depiction of 50s racism. Not that I would really understand the reality of it.
So who has seen it, and what did you think?
I’m eager to watch Them, just finishing up Red Rock.
We should do a contrast-and-compare exercise about portrayals of black suburban families menaced by otherworldly figures.
It’d be Us vs Them.
< runs away >
The first time I saw a commercial for this I only caught about half of it and thought it was related to Us and was later disappointed to learn it was not produced by Jordan Peele.
I’ve only seen the first ep so far. It’s well done but the cruelty toward the family is a bit hard to watch and the death of the dog almost made me give up on it.
c
Will definitely be watching more, although it’s one that I might only be able to take one ep at a time.
I stopped right after the family moved into the house. I just couldn’t bring myself to watch any more.
I watched the entire show in the past few days. The first episodes sucked me in. I became more and more uncomfortable with the show as it went on, but kept watching until the end, which I found very disappointing and poorly written.
Here’s my opinion of Them. It’s “torture porn.” It’s a continuation of the same genre as Last House on the Left, Funny Games, and Hostel - a pure shock genre with very, very little to redeem it, in my opinion. The creator of Them seemed to relish in torturing the characters and…virtually nothing else. To me, the theme of racial struggle was just window dressing. I did not find it to be socially relevant or in any way a “take” on any timely racial issues of the day. I think that the show’s creators were, in fact, cynically hijacking these topical themes as a vehicle for their shock porn.
As is my common practice, after finishing a series or movie, I usually delve into the reviews and Reddit to see what other people thought. In this case, as I suspected, a hell of a lot of other people feel the same way.
I’ll add this disclaimer. I am a white guy. Them is a black show. I know there’s potential here for me to sound patronizing or dismissive of it because of the legacy of racism in this country. I hope, most sincerely, that my criticism of it isn’t taken this way. Racism, even in its most violent and disturbing forms, is an important issue that legitimately deserves to be explored by movies and shows. I do not believe this was an example of that. At all.
The reviews I’ve read, and which I can already agree with somewhat, even having only watched the first ep, is along the lines of " real life racism is horrifying enough, and depicting it over the top with other worldly elements trivializes it".
There are some things about the show I like; the cast and the setting are excellent and capture 1950s L.A.(or at least how I imagine it). But I can’t watch the constant victimization of these folks if there is to be no comeuppance for the bad guys. It’s just too much.
I agree with y’all - it was created to be shocking just for the sake of shock, not for exposing racism. That was just a vehicle.