The Madness

After watching 4 episodes, the first thought I had was- that could easily have been done in 2! And therein likes the problem. It's not the acting, the actors or the plot. It's just that somebody decided to drag this across 8 episodes.

This means that the plot is needlessly stretched, the story meanders and sometimes you feel like just fast forwarding 10 mins so that they get to the point.

As far the people rating this 3 stars, it's really not that bad. Netflix really needs to start undertaking understanding that people won't get dragged by shows that are stretched just to keep one on the platform. And that's all this is- an effort to keep you on 8 hours!

There are many elements to this series that are well done. But I just felt it was awkward. There were so many things about the script, the direction and the acting that felt awkward. Embarrassingly so at times.

Some of the dialogue seemed so incomplete and so unpolished that I was left shaking my head. It rendered the relationships in the story incomplete and lacking depth. I feel I should have had warm feelings for many characters, but didn't.

I understand techniques to make the audience uneasy, but this is different. If it was deliberate, it failed in the execution. If this is a new style of film making, I hope it passes.

Coleman Domingo is becoming my favorite actor. He really can make reading the phone book a compelling story. And that's just about as compelling as The Madness right now. The dialogue is almost embarrassingly bad. They try very hard to be punchy and snappy but it comes across as very predictable and corny.

From the beginning, there's much about the story that just defies the most basic commonsense. I constantly find myself asking 'why why why?!' So much so that after episode 2, I skipped episode 7 just to see what happens at the end. I have little doubt that there's little more than lots of overwrought storytelling and superfluous dialogue in the episodes I skipped.

When I started watching this, I was quite impressed. The first episode was really intriguing and exciting. I love crime-dramas, so I was looking forward to binging this series.

The acting is excellent, throughout and hats off to the cast for making this at all watchable. They do brilliantly with a very poor script. I just found the dialogue really cringy and some of the decisions made by the main characters were just not believable. The storyline overall is interesting but a bit of a mess to be honest. I think it has some good elements in it, reflecting the issues there are with racism, right-wing groups etc but I felt that it was trying to sit on the fence about where the blame lies.

That said, I felt empathy for the family throughout and that is all down to the acting. I hope to see the cast in something more worthy of them in the future.

This show started pretty good and it was very interesting, but somewhere in the middle of it, I got lost.

The characters were good, the acting could have been better, but I think that everything could have been sorted out in like five or six episodes. It became boring.

Too much dragging and unnecessary scenes and moments. I got to the end, somehow.

Also, some scenes were to cringe and not believable at all. Very mediocre. It felt like I was watching some type of telenovela.

All in all, I do recommend this because it was not that bad, it was okay with a dose of boredom.

Was sorry for that guy Franco, you'll see.