Seven episode season, watched over 3-4 days.
I was really excited for this as a big Coup/StBY fan, but I have to say this was a pretty deflating watch by the end.
Politically you are not ever going to find a more openly left-wing scripted show, period, at least not produced in America. That's cool and all, but by the midway point we literally have the Boots surrogate character explaining capitalist exploitation, the need for a movement of workers etc via actual presentations that stop the thing dead in its tracks. My guess is Boots felt like he had one shot at this massive platform and felt the need to be as explicit and didactic as possible.
I won't drill into it all here but so many plot elements and little beats feel like prescriptive messages aimed at the predominantly young male audience that will end up watching...at times it drifts into outright edutainment
And some of you will say that's a good thing, and I the fairly online leftist is not the target audience....but hoo lord I have to imagine that anyone who is not already onboard with Boots' vision of a world where (spoiler alert)
spoiler
superpowered fascists can be defeated with a single Marxist slideshow
is gonna turn this off fast.
The jolts of humanity (mostly via the performances which are great across the board) and occasional amazing bits of surreal humor got me to the end (I will say there is one sequence in the last episode that justifies my viewing time) but yeah, real letdown for me personally. I really thought StBY nailed the mix of elements whereas here I just felt pandered and preached to... Hope it works better for yalls, big love to boots if you're reading :/
It's not a classic or anything (the whole scenario is pretty op only contrived) but it has some solid laughs, decent performances and doesn't overstay its welcome. Obviously the social commentary is limited/lib AF but that comes with the territory. Sterling K Brown is really good and I'd like to see him get Supporting (to the extent that I care).