Critic Reviews
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At least "Before" had the decency to come up with a different ending. It's the beginning and everything in between that's the problem.
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Before is a meandering mess from start to finish.
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It’s disjointed in its best moments and flat-out bad in its worst, and by the end of the series, it feels like a waste of time.
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Even with half-hour episodes, several coming in under the 25-minute mark, this drama still manages to drag, endlessly repeating the same setups and visual themes to buy time until an unsatisfying conclusion.
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Crystal is believable enough in portraying Eli’s professional skills and emotional vulnerabilities. It just doesn’t have nearly enough gravity or charisma to compensate for the dull, repetitive, unintentionally silly story. .... 10 half-hour episodes feel punishing, well before a finale that offers an uninteresting explanation of the main mystery, and can’t even be bothered to resolve several other running plot threads.
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Very little is earned in Before, which is basically a flimsy direct-to-video movie from the late ’90s stretched to 10 stultifying half-hour episodes.
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The series fails on just about every level. It’s emotionally shallow and, stretched across 10 repetitive episodes, chronically boring—a psychological thriller that offers neither psychological insight nor thrills. The story is at once familiar and ridiculous. The dialogue is a string of clichés.