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 :/
No way he doesn't want a second season, right? What was up with the skin disease? The ending, which I think everyone is criticizing for the same reason, works IMO because the show goes out of its way to depict the hero as an idealist. They shut him down by explaining to him in plain and simple terms that the ideal he was pursuing was completely false, and in fact through his actions he reinforced a system that undermined justice. If I had to guess where the show was gonna go with that in a second season, they might have a board of directors step in to play the role of villains, to really drive the point home that what they're fighting against is a system and not evil individuals.
Tough to imagine Amazon orders a second season unless it becomes some kind of critical/audience breakout, but stranger decisions have been made by streamers.
100% agree unfortunately. It doesn't seem to be doing so hot, saw almost no discussion of it on Reddit, I imagine it's probably not spreading much by word of mouth in other social media either. I also heard that the marketing for it was pretty lacking, I don't know much about that honestly since it's been a while since I've seen an ad for any show in general.
I'm sure it doesn't help that Boots can't really promote it due to the strike either.
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I could picture that, I could also picture him going kinda nihilist but being replaced by his board of directors. There's a few possibilities.