Lovecraft Country

I have not had a show relate so much to my inner nerd and suspense. This is an excellent show which gives factual Black history.

This show is based on Matt Ruff's novel. Not on any of the original Lovecraft works. The people who are complaining about propaganda, liberal media, or bla bla bla are idiots. The TV-show is following the source material fairly well. They didn't choose the title just to cash in on the Lovecraft name, they choose this work because they clearly liked the source.

However! The novel is so loosely connected to the Lovecraft's original work, that it's almost insulting. The novel is really bad and the show is doing absolutely nothing to improve upon it.

I really feel like I'm watching two completely different things here. On one hand it's a really well-crafted story about racism in the south during the Jim Crow era. On the other hand it's a horrible bad attempt at horror.

The acting is really solid. The story is well-developed, but the characters are so flat and predictable. Both the antagonists and the protagonists are boring stereotypes. The side-characters are almost parodying. They are an exaggerated imitation that fails to be humorously. The only character that seems to have some flesh on his bones are Atticus.

The dialogue is really well-written. But, The pacing of the script is terrible. It feels like I'm watching a 50 minute intro to a 2 minute movie.

The soundtrack is just all over the place. I appreciate BB King everyday of the week, but when it's inter-cut with some unflinchingly generic hiphop it just hurts my ears. The intro is suppose to show a scene from Korea, but has music form the 20's. The show takes place during the Korea war (that ended in '53), but 'you upset me baby' wasn't released until 1957.

The CGI is awful. Really really bad 2001-ish quality CGI. This is an HBO-show. Why does it look like a LOTR rip-off from some b-rate studio VHS tape?

And it's just all these small details that constantly shakes you out of immersion with the show. Every time you relaxed and start to get dragged into it, you get jolted back into your own living room by the fact that you are watching a screen-play of a amateur novel.

I really liked the first episode, it was a great pilot. Very refreshing and I would recommend everyone to watch it. I don't know what happened after, but the show quickly after the first one because very boring and unoriginal. I think they might went too far with the racism as well. Not because of the white people, but because it makes the whole story and character actions very predictable and cliche. A part from the first one, this show was a letdown.

The series tried tying together so many ideas in such a short period that it ended up being way too choppy. Every episode feels like its purpose is to highlight racial inequality during the time period, rather than delivering a coherent plot. It focused so much on race that it really hampered the enjoyability of the fantasy aspects.

Wanted to like it. First episode was really good and so was the second and third one but after that it pretty much went downhill.. too much going one and not finishing a story before it starts a new one. Too bad. The beginning it had so much potential