Season #: 2, 1
Critic Reviews
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Full of twists, turns and tonal gear-changes, Am I Being Unreasonable? is perhaps the most idiosyncratic home-grown series you’ll see all year. Try not to pigeonhole it or judge it simply as a comedy. Stick with it, strap in and relish the wild ride.
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The whole set-up of AIBU has been written by Cooper and Hizli, and the script is intricately structured so as to maintain that balance between reality and deception, past and present, lies and truth – and they succeed admirably. Presumably created with themselves in mind, their respective performances are flawless.
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t is a darkly humorous thriller. Cooper co-created it with her costar, Selin Hizli, and it plays out cleverly across six half-hour episodes.
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Although the show never settles on answer to the question posed in the title, it successfully adds itself to the ever-expanding category of shows about messy, complicated women without falling prey to the staleness of traditional sitcoms. And it does this all without forgetting to make you laugh.
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Despite having a bored and unlikable character at its center, Am I Being Unreasonable? sets up enough mysteries and questions to make the three-hour series breeze by.
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Nic is troubled, and therefore trouble, but Cooper has not tried to make her sympathetic; indeed, she becomes less sympathetic with time. One doesn’t root for her so much as root for her to get over herself.
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You can applaud the ambition while wishing they had reined themselves in just a little more and made sure the whole was properly fit for purpose – and the showcase Cooper and Hizli certainly deserve.
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Am I Being Unreasonable? is far from bad TV. I just wish it had been given more time to tell a complete story, with a perceptible middle, beginning and end. I hope three series down the line, I’m eating my words.
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The series' tonal quirks and imbalances may be off-putting to some – the darkness of some subject matter right from the off is gripping but jarring – but it's in the scenes between mother and son that sitcom fans may find themselves most at home.
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It’s a showcase for many of the same performance traits that make Cooper so watchable in Rain Dogs and it’s a fully engaging show to follow and attempt to figure out. At the same time, it’s a show that, in its attempts to be structurally ambitious, undermines its emotional core. It’s a story of two friends bound by complementary trauma that’s too often turned into a guessing game.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 1 out of 3
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Mixed: 0 out of 3
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Negative: 2 out of 3
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Apr 12, 2023