The Watcher

I knew nothing about The Watcher and was looking to watch something while on the treadmill the other day. At first I was questioning some of the writing and thinking things were a bit hokey, but then I got hooked.

I watched the entire season in one day. I had to to know what was going on and what was going to happen next. I truly was enjoying what I was watching.

So the last episode came on and I was excited to see how the heck they were going to wrap this up and man did they really mess this up. The plot twists were getting to be too much and when it was all over I was like "Huh? What about this thing and that thing? Why did they bring these things up and not address them any further?

I am disappointed to have spent the day watching six interesting episodes only to have the seventh episode (the last one) be a complete turd.

I would save your time and watch something else.

I feel like somebody just ripped me off. I watched all 7 episodes because the cast was amazing and honestly the story DID have potential. The ending was one of the laziest bits of "writing" I've ever seen. It was as if the writer wrote themselves into too many dead ends, and tried too hard to build this huge tapestry that made no sense whatsoever that they decided to just give up on writing a conclusion. Imagine reading a really long novel only to reach the end and find out the final chapter was removed. That's the best analogy I can think of for this mess of a show. Forever hating myself for watching all 7 damn episodes... The brilliant cast did their part though; the acting was great. Not enough to fill the massive holes in the series though.

I feel like this show was written by someone who thinks they're a very clever writer. There are constant occurrences of misdirection throughout the show but the issue with this is that, if you just take a couple seconds to actually think about it, you see right though it. It's like the second any information is divulged to the main characters they just automatically run with it instead of taking a step back to use their brain..

...without giving anything away I'll just give a relatable example. Imagine a movie where the main character's parents were killed with a golf club by a man in a red hat. Then 40 years later the main character is golfing and sees someone else on the green in a red hat... so they go up to this person and start bearing them up mercilessly... but the person they're beating up is only like 19 or 20 years old... meaning there's no way in hell they could have been the murderer..

That's what happens in this show over and over and over again. It's like the writer thinks they're being clever by relating one thing to another to misdirect you but entirely lacks the ability to connect the pieces logically.

Nobody in this show has a single ounce of common sense and it gets frustrating so fast and so frequently. Idk imagine someone gets shot and everyone in the area looks in the direction where they thought the bullet was coming from and they just see a baby in a cradle sleeping.. well in reality we can deduce that it 100% was not this sleeping baby that shot someone.. but in this show, all they would think would be, "man shot. Gunshot come from that direction. Sleeping baby in that direction. Must be sleeping baby. Everyone attack sleeping baby"

Just, not a well-written show at all.

Seems like Ryan Murphy realized after the last, oh, 5 or 6 out of the 10 seasons of "American Horror Story" that people were hip to the title and knew not to bother watching, so he started releasing seasonal "miniseries" without the AHS brand but essentially the same thing: well acted, well-produced, contrived, trashily written garbage, with "twists" you can see coming a mile off and absurd contrived characters whose overwrought behavior stretches the bounds of credulity. I was actually about 5 episodes into this, scratching my head about how something with such a talented cast could be such an unredeemable pile of soap-opera garbage in terms of plot, when I finally noticed Murphy's name in the credits.

Please, Ryan Murphy, go back to calling the new seasons "American Horror Story" so we know from the outset not to bother hoping for better.

I must admit this series did frustrate me at times and also felt like a typical thriller with too many plot twists and turns.

However, what I did find unique embedded in this series is the subject of obsession with materialism and the lengths people will go to to secure and protect those obsessions.

I'm not sure if that was deliberate on the part of the producers to do a series that is part social commentary part thriller but it does work as a suspenseful series that kept this viewer locked in, despite sometimes being frustrated with the obviously dead end twists and turns.

Overall an addictive viewing experience.