Joshua "J" Cody loses his mother to an overdose. He finds new shelter in his grandmother's pompous house, where he also meets his uncles. He quickly discovers that the Cody family finances their lifestyle through illegal activities - from this moment on, J's life changes suddenly.
For my part, I have to say "Animal Kingdom" is definitely a good and entertaining series that draws the viewer deep into the machinations of the Cody family, but the series also has its shortcomings.
The series starts relatively slowly - so slowly that at the beginning of the second season I actually considered whether I should drop the series because it had already been very long-winded up to that point, but I decided to finish at least the second season. I'm glad I did that because halfway through the second season the show finally picks up speed and as a viewer you become more tied to the series.
At the beginning the series also has an unusually large number of sex scenes, but this slowly decreases as the seasons progress.
I saw the series in German and unfortunately the dubbing isn't the best. Sometimes emotions are mostly lost in translation because something is not emphasized correctly according to the situation.
In my opinion, the series could have been significantly shorter, as there is a lot of unnecessary sub-plots or flashbacks, which makes the series relatively boring in some places.
The flashbacks are shown from season 4 onwards and give the viewer context to understand how the characters became the way they are. I learned to love the flashbacks towards the end, but when they were first shown at the beginning of season 4, I found them quite annoying because they took the momentum out of the story in the present.
But the flashbacks contribute a lot to my personal highlight of the series and those are its characters. I've rarely seen a series that wrote its characters as well as "Animal Kingdom." The characters actually all grow on you in some way and that's difficult to master when you consider that you have such a relatively large number of main characters here.
In summary, I say "Animal Kingdom" is far from a masterpiece, but a series that manages to perfectly combine crime and family drama and is clearly worth your time!
