GrahamCracker
Don't fµck with me fellas!
I wanted to start a thread about this, because it seems to be coming up in every other thread lately.
This show has Viola Davis and that's always a redeeming quality - to a point. I completely skipped Annalise's arc in jail episodes because I had no use for the torture pδrn they were.
And yes Viola is too good for this show to a point it's not even funny anymore.
Having said that I really liked what this show was like originally. I like the mystery and I like the mini mysteries that were the cases of the week. It also conveniently kept the cheap melodrama to a minimum. But I did like the messiness that stem from the main characters being involved in all of it.
I had no issues with either Annalise or Wes at the center of the narrative. Why Sam had to die and why it was ok for them to get away with it worked for me - they always painted law enforcement as corrupted/uninterested in actual justice, not coincidently Annalise's clients were predominantly innocent.
And frankly I didn't think Sam was worthy of Wes' life being ruined over him.
This was also how the show was written up to the 1st midseason finale.
Right after that the show started changing course. They started downplaying the roles most had in Sam's death while overstating the responsibilities of Annalise and Wes (this may sound weird but before Wes delivers the fatal blow to Sam he is urged by all of them to do something and at that point they assumed Sam was already dead by somebody else's hand, Connor enthusiastically decimated Sam's remains and was responsible for the crappy job they did at disposing of Sam's remains - meaning they wrote the events in a way that makes them all ultimately responsible).
They even half redeem Sam with every flashback. He tends to be depicted as the long suffering husband of the evil b!tch that is Annalise.
They created this antagonistic dynamic that made Wes and Annalise to be the bad guys while Connor, Frank, Oliver and occasionally Laurel, Asher and Bonnie the good guys, though they're far more consistent with the first 3.
This is where they started loosing because what they were pushing never worked for me. It doesn't even make sense within the storyline either.
This is most obvious around Frank. Frank being Lila's killer means he is directly responsible (with Sam) for all the fuckery that happened for the get go.
Frank and Sam were the only two people who could stop everything starting with Rebecca being accused (or Lila being murdered) of the murder and Annalise going crazy over her suspicions over Sam being involved.
But that never translated into the show, except for one snarky remark made by Laurel.
With everything that was revealed about Frank's role in Annalise loosing her son, while Wes and Anna were being vilified usually through Connor, it only made the show less appealing to me.
With this the actual narrative, what each character did or was responsible for, lost all importance to the alleged popularity of the characters. The writers and part of the audience sided with who they liked, completely disregarding the actual events in the show.
It seems to be a show that only really works with a certain set of biases, racial above all.
When Wes was revealed to be dead all the impressions I had about the show (and Pete Nowalk as the showrunner) were confirmed. As much of a problem as I had with Wes being killed off (and trust me I have a ton of them starting with the lack of character exploration and "humanisation" scenes especially compared to other characters and the elitists undertones since they got rid of all the "poor" characters) I always insisted it was about Annalise too - not coincidentally a couple of months later Pete would be stating in interviews how he plans to move the show from Annalise's world to Jorge's and publications like Dateline were speculating that Viola's role may be reduced in the 4th season.
Laurel has become insufferable (she's been useless before to be honest) but it's because they turned her in a plot device-punchline like they did with Wes. Note the "it's your faults" directed at her. It's pretty much the same thing they did with Wes. I wouldn't really mind her storyline if it was well written and developed but it's not and again for the same reasons as always. I found her boning Frank in extremely poor taste, and I really find it intolerable how Connor and Oliver get into their meltdowns and blame games when they're so untouchable they haven't really been affected by everything that happened in the show.
Michaela is of course reduced to the best friend trope so I can't really blame the character for the writers being, uhm ,"old fashioned".
The minute the most important thing in the show became things always working out for Connor, Oliver, Frank and Asher, they lost me in short. They aren't interesting enough for me, nor are they important to the narrative enough for it to feel justified and it's actually arguably deeply problematic.
This show has Viola Davis and that's always a redeeming quality - to a point. I completely skipped Annalise's arc in jail episodes because I had no use for the torture pδrn they were.
And yes Viola is too good for this show to a point it's not even funny anymore.
Having said that I really liked what this show was like originally. I like the mystery and I like the mini mysteries that were the cases of the week. It also conveniently kept the cheap melodrama to a minimum. But I did like the messiness that stem from the main characters being involved in all of it.
I had no issues with either Annalise or Wes at the center of the narrative. Why Sam had to die and why it was ok for them to get away with it worked for me - they always painted law enforcement as corrupted/uninterested in actual justice, not coincidently Annalise's clients were predominantly innocent.
And frankly I didn't think Sam was worthy of Wes' life being ruined over him.
This was also how the show was written up to the 1st midseason finale.
Right after that the show started changing course. They started downplaying the roles most had in Sam's death while overstating the responsibilities of Annalise and Wes (this may sound weird but before Wes delivers the fatal blow to Sam he is urged by all of them to do something and at that point they assumed Sam was already dead by somebody else's hand, Connor enthusiastically decimated Sam's remains and was responsible for the crappy job they did at disposing of Sam's remains - meaning they wrote the events in a way that makes them all ultimately responsible).
They even half redeem Sam with every flashback. He tends to be depicted as the long suffering husband of the evil b!tch that is Annalise.
They created this antagonistic dynamic that made Wes and Annalise to be the bad guys while Connor, Frank, Oliver and occasionally Laurel, Asher and Bonnie the good guys, though they're far more consistent with the first 3.
This is where they started loosing because what they were pushing never worked for me. It doesn't even make sense within the storyline either.
This is most obvious around Frank. Frank being Lila's killer means he is directly responsible (with Sam) for all the fuckery that happened for the get go.
Frank and Sam were the only two people who could stop everything starting with Rebecca being accused (or Lila being murdered) of the murder and Annalise going crazy over her suspicions over Sam being involved.
But that never translated into the show, except for one snarky remark made by Laurel.
With everything that was revealed about Frank's role in Annalise loosing her son, while Wes and Anna were being vilified usually through Connor, it only made the show less appealing to me.
With this the actual narrative, what each character did or was responsible for, lost all importance to the alleged popularity of the characters. The writers and part of the audience sided with who they liked, completely disregarding the actual events in the show.
It seems to be a show that only really works with a certain set of biases, racial above all.
When Wes was revealed to be dead all the impressions I had about the show (and Pete Nowalk as the showrunner) were confirmed. As much of a problem as I had with Wes being killed off (and trust me I have a ton of them starting with the lack of character exploration and "humanisation" scenes especially compared to other characters and the elitists undertones since they got rid of all the "poor" characters) I always insisted it was about Annalise too - not coincidentally a couple of months later Pete would be stating in interviews how he plans to move the show from Annalise's world to Jorge's and publications like Dateline were speculating that Viola's role may be reduced in the 4th season.
Laurel has become insufferable (she's been useless before to be honest) but it's because they turned her in a plot device-punchline like they did with Wes. Note the "it's your faults" directed at her. It's pretty much the same thing they did with Wes. I wouldn't really mind her storyline if it was well written and developed but it's not and again for the same reasons as always. I found her boning Frank in extremely poor taste, and I really find it intolerable how Connor and Oliver get into their meltdowns and blame games when they're so untouchable they haven't really been affected by everything that happened in the show.
Michaela is of course reduced to the best friend trope so I can't really blame the character for the writers being, uhm ,"old fashioned".
The minute the most important thing in the show became things always working out for Connor, Oliver, Frank and Asher, they lost me in short. They aren't interesting enough for me, nor are they important to the narrative enough for it to feel justified and it's actually arguably deeply problematic.