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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
8
Mixed:
9
Negative:
3
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Critic Reviews
Sep 10, 2020
Season 1 Review:
Coastal Elites wears its heart on its political sleeve, and the disdain for President Trump and all that he represents in this HBO special is searing and palpable. Yet while the five monologues presented don't seek to convert anyone, they do encapsulate the rage and confusion Trump's election unleashed within the zip codes that conservatives dismiss, while elevating shot-during-quarantine TV to new heights.
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Sep 10, 2020
Season 1 Review:
There is artistry to savor in “Coastal Elites,” as the actors surf on Rudnick’s script, which spends just enough time with each of them and which contains a number of clever punchlines. ... Each of the actors holds attention expertly, ranging through emotions seamlessly, with Roach making only a few cuts within each monologue.
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Sep 8, 2020
Sep 4, 2020
Season 1 Review:
The special’s true value as a showcase for a handful of terrifically shaded performances gradually emerges through the occasional overwritten staginess. Still, the relentless march of five separate monologues all about the maddeningly implacable evils each character faces in this America of COVID and Trump is, as stated, a lot to take in in one sitting.
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TV Guide MagazineAug 28, 2020
Season 1 Review:
With a stellar cast of four current Emmy nominees and a past winner, in performances shot in quarantine, these hysterical if uneven showcases have the impact of soul-bearing catharsis. [31 Aug - 13 Sep 2020, p.7]
Sep 11, 2020
Season 1 Review:
Call them liberals, Democrats, anti-Trumpers or just plain fed up. They’re losing their minds and this awkward, uneven, funny and sometimes moving program from satirist and playwright Paul Rudnick and director Jay Roach (“Recount,” “Bombshell”) attempts to capture the progressive zeitgeist. ... Sharynn Tarrows (Dever) is exhausted after a 14-hour shift, and her testimony is so moving it redeems some of the weaker aspects of “Coastal Elites.”
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Jan 14, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Rudnick's efforts to evolve "Coastal Elites" from a live stage production a montage of quarantine solo performances for HBO are apparent even so, and the actors' handle that pivot as expertly as one can. But in making this necessary transition the casualty is the sense of commiseration a "Coastal Elites" audience might have gotten from being in the company of likeminded souls indulging in an evening of theater.
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Sep 11, 2020
Season 1 Review:
Too often infuriatingly loud, overplays too many dramatic beats and takes what should have been a series of intimate monologues and makes them cartoonish. Directed with no real sense of volume control by Jay Roach from a script of wildly varying quality by Paul Rudnick, Coastal Elites is airing as a 90-minute feature on HBO, some acting exercises loosely bound in a pandemic sausage casing.
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Sep 1, 2020
Season 1 Review:
“Coastal Elites” isn’t nearly introspective enough to get past its semi-ironic title to say anything new about the people or feelings it’s trying to examine. ... Watching “Coastal Elites,” it’s strange to know that it so insistently labels itself a satire when it’s so painfully earnest in practice.
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Sep 10, 2020
Season 1 Review:
Meant to be a satire of the rich, "elite" political Left, the series makes fun of them but offers an infantilizing imagining of conservatives from a liberal point of view. ... Stories of the pandemic are half-baked and feel tacked on in "Coastal," which otherwise is more interested in political debate. But the special is misguided in its exploration of the crisis we are living through. Dever's monologue is entirely about COVID, and while the actress is accomplished in her delivery, the script is egregiously shallow.
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The GuardianSep 8, 2020
Season 1 Review:
Issa Rae’s appearance punctuates the parade of whiteness, though her character does little more than provide lip service to diversity of perspective. ... The Danish film-maker Lars Von Trier says that a good film should be “like a rock in your shoe”, and the poet Cesar A Cruz declared the purpose of art “to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed”. In this capacity, by the basic functioning of art, Rudnick and Roach have failed. As activists, doubly so.
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