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 :/
I don’t think that the lecture bits are bad at all, they are so well presented and performed that I think anyone could find them interesting. In fact, I think they’re less interesting to us because we already know what they’re gonna say.
The first one (well besides the really short one when they’re smoking and talking about relationships) was really good because it springboarded off of several emotional points in the episode, which were IMO the show’s highlights. So the viewer is already primed to sit down and hear an explanation for the violence that the characters are facing, which of course mirrors the violence the working class faces. I was tearing up before the speech, I’d imagine a pretty significant number of viewers would be emotionally affected too, and hearing a materialist explanation for why this violence occurs is most effective at that moment when we can relate it to experiences in the real world.
The second one I think also works well because of the drama of the hero’s character, his internal conflicts and his contradictory nature. He’s an idealist that just wants to justify his power to himself by punishing criminals. The show had illustrated that he had put up a ton of defense mechanisms to prevent the cognitive dissonance of doing harm to do “good” from catching up to him, so seeing him disarmed and shown exactly why he’s ineffective is some primo schadenfreude slop.