[ad_1]
Woo! Netflix finally spends real money in Australia, and his first original series on the Australians was dropped on Friday.
Boo! It's not great. It's actually a little bad.
What could be described generously as a cross between a late season of True blood and At home and on the outside, Tidelands Australia deserves to represent us on the American streaming service.
It's a pity, because the fact that Netflix is finally fully funding an Australian series should be a moment of encouragement. After all, we are a small English-speaking market happy to consume American content voraciously. So there is no real business case for it.
So it's great, they did it at all. But was it to act from this series?
Shot in southeastern Queensland and manufactured by the Australian production company Hoodlum (Secrets and lies), the disappointing Tidelands is a supernatural policeman thriller. Two of these words are true – there are supernatural elements and there is a crime, but nothing excites about it.
The opening sequence features a bad woman aboard a fishing boat clasping the eyes of someone, blood flowing on her arms. This is the kind of subtlety that summarizes Tidelands – unnecessarily violent trying to move you or shock you with moments of nudity weirdly placed.
The premise of the show is that there are mermaids – mythical creatures that have attracted fishermen to their aquatic deaths with the song.
And a group of them, led by the authoritarian leader Adrielle Cuthbert (Elsa Pataky), has lived for centuries on the outskirts of a small coastal town called Orphelin Bay.
The prodigal daughter of the city, Calliope McTeer (Charlotte Best), returns after a 10 year stay in jail / juvie. Her arrival exacerbates tensions as she tries to reintegrate her family, which includes her brother Augie (Aaron Jakubenko), a drug addict, and her angry mother, an hefty thief.
Augie's anti-drug operation is based on sirens or what the city calls the sponsors, but Adrielle is distracted by something else, an old prophecy and some very old artifacts.
Without knowing it, Calliope is in a way related to all this. May be. It's very confusing.
The first episode is weak, especially for a pilot because he fails to effectively establish a main story and why anyone should care about these soft and stereotypical characters.
And while the next episodes resumed, at least when trying to win a plot, or several plots, he devolved again with a triple-cross double cross in the middle of the season, allowing you to raise your hands as a sign of the game. ;exasperation. . The last thing Tidelands needs is more "twists".
With so many topics to follow (corrupt cops, magical prophecies, drug cartels in big cities struggling for territory, an old seer woman trapped in a dungeon who might not be lost love for a long time). another character!) And nothing indicates that it is so. To solve this problem satisfactorily, there is no reason to stay at the end of the eight-episode series.
The performances are light – most actors resorting to a pleated forehead or shining to make sure we know they are anxious.
But damn it, they're pretty, all of the glittering sunlit bodies and perfect beach hairs (with the exception of this tragic mullet).
Peter O'Brien is the only one here with an ounce of gravitas and even the talented Madeleine Madden, left behind by a silly scenario that takes itself too seriously.
But in the end, you can not blame the actors too much because writing is the real culprit – they can not play what is not on the page. Which, ironically for a show staged by and in the water, is depth.
Which does not mean that Tidelands will be ridiculed universally. It ticks a lot of boxes that a certain group of people search in a show – viewers who like CW shows like Mermaid, The vampire journal and his kind can find it observable.
There are supernatural hotties in a television soap opera story, punctuated with violence and "bady" nudity. So, yes, he will have an audience.
Although, as far as Tidelands is strangely boring. It has no verve, not even a crazy, ridiculous – at least it would have been fun.
Tidelands arrives on Netflix Friday, December 14 at 19h.
Share your TV and film obsessions: @wenleima
[ad_2]
Source link
