A Million Little Things

Each twist can potentially upset the direction that the show seems to be heading in and instead create something profound. But for now, it feels like a well-orchestrated attempt to force melodrama into meaning while hooking viewers with an icky sense of ghoulish curiosity.

It’s so transparent about its intentions and also because it wants so badly for its audience to love these characters. Even though the cast is decent, the characters don’t immediately pop because the writing lacks nuance.

A very good cast and a steady vein of humor keep A Million Little Things watchable, while the fetishizing of death and a failure to generate consistent complementary emotions keep it from rising above a well-intentioned slog, a derivative Thirtysomething Reasons Why.

The soapy drama turns out to be a bit too much, and if that’s what the creators think is necessary to sustain the show, it might hint at structural flaws that a TV series can’t overcome.

If This Is Us and The Big Chill had a baby, it would be the show this wants to be, but isn't. [28 Sep 2018, p.49]

It's a good ensemble, but the whole exercise feels too conspicuously like a throwback to a certain kind of ABC drama that, frankly, has seen better days, and which has begun yielding diminishing returns.

A pilot that’s both intriguing, as we see the bits of deception underpinning an all-male clique, and frustrating, as it often strains credulity as well as certain boundaries of taste.

Projecting male sensitivity through drama scripts seems to be a difficult task for any writer who isn’t Shonda Rhimes, but this series is an example of how not to do it, in that it links men having feelings to crisis and misery. Relationship ennui and marital bed death are low-key obstacles here, but even worse is the way the premiere capitalizes on the disconnect between the four main characters and the wives and girlfriends in their lives.