semmian-93345

The show starts out interestingly enough, with Hamm playing a just fired investment guru with a divorced or separated wife who cheated on him with his best friend. Who then takes to robbing his friends and acquaintances to make ends meet. Its slightly comedic and interesting to see how he decides what to steal and finds a fence. About midway through it changes gears and is less about the robbing and more about relationships as Ham and the ex-wife rekindle their relationship. The rest of the series is the audience just waiting to see how he beats the murder charge.

There are no surprises here. You know who the real killer is right from the beginning. It's all based on the casting and how each person plays off each other. You know he's going to beat the rap, and you know he's going to get back with the ex-wife, who by the way is a horrible person. There's a red herring subplot involving a pretty housekeeper who briefly becomes his partner. This storyline goes completely dead half way through. There's another subplot involving an art dealer that also goes nowhere.

Hamm tries to channel his inner Cary Grant for this role but fails miserably. He just comes off as arrogant and at no point do you feel he's lost control of the situation. If the whole point of this series was to showcase how empty and shallow the rich are, it succeeds brilliantly.

There's some big names in this but I felt the lead actor, Joel Edgerton was horribly miscast. He's not a particularly good actor in general and in Dark Matter he is suppose to be a brilliant scientist who invents an other worldly device. Yet Joel plays him like he's a truck driver. He's slow on the uptake, takes forever to figure things out and speaks like an uneducated labourer. Fortunately, the rest of the cast is pretty good. I especially liked Jimmi Simpson.

The pacing is pretty slow as well. There's too many episodes to this thing and it could have been wrapped up much quicker, especially as you know pretty much from the first couple of episodes what's going on. It doesn't leave much mystery for the audience.

Did Ms Larsen not get the memo about unattainable Hollywood body standards? Watching her is like watching someone who's just gone through a famine. I can't take my eyes off her impossibly thin waist and chicken legs.

People who gave this show a 9 or 10 should watch Mad Men. What would they give it I wonder? 19 or 20? Sorry, ratings are out of 10.

The series starts out pretty good, but by the 5th or 6th episode it really starts to drag. The plot such that it is, ends up being about highway zoning through an affluent black neighborhood, yawn.

The characters are basically cartoon villains men and women combined. Men come off misogynistic and the women, except for Larson and Harriet, are your basic Stepford Wives. The station manager even has the Snidely Whiplash moustache! The typical Hollywood premise of white people bad, black people good, except for the leads of course.

I also got tired of Larson's robotic way of talking which occasionally disappears when she's talking to her daughter or Harriet.