Crisis in Six Scenes

Allen brings the whole TV-series self-consciousness bit home in the final minutes of the last episode, but he needn’t have worried. The fact that he hasn’t spent the past half-century trying to remake “My Mother the Car” enables him to simply adapt what he does best for the so-called small screen. And it’s a good fit. The performances are winning, with wonderful cameo contributions.

Crisis is not Allen at his peak, nor at his most serious and contemplative as an artist. Crisis is a bauble, a light comedy that starts very slowly (consider that another caution) and builds to a satisfyingly funny conclusion.

This isn’t Allen at his wittiest or wildest--his career is almost by definition a thing of peaks and valleys, and he can be satisfying and frustrating within a single film. But he has a voice, and he has not yet lost it. Anyone susceptible to that sensibility will find many familiar pleasures here.

It won’t stack up to the director’s better accomplishments, but it doesn’t want to be. It’s pure new Woody Allen entertainment.

The first few episodes meander by, full of too-long dialogue and not enough action, while all the best moments are precise. ... Crisis gets better as it goes on, perhaps because a climax is not so different in film and television.

There are smiles, but also cringes. Cyrus is terrible, and even May can't do much with this. Allen is Allen.

For fans of a certain earlier strain of his work, its shambling, amiable vibe may seem comfortingly familiar. But Crisis also seems inconsequential.

Some skillfully deployed, binge-enabling cliff-hangers notwithstanding, there’s not much here to differentiate Crisis In Six Scenes from any other late-period Allen trifle, slurped down in under 90 minutes and forgotten until the next round of cryptic casting announcements.

Allen’s been doing this kind of humor for 50 years. It shows.

The main characters just bicker at each other using staid arguments, and though the last few episodes have some mildly entertaining caper and farce elements, the payoff isn’t quite enough to justify sitting through all six episodes.

Talky, tired, tame Crisis is a misfire.

An aggressively mediocre series. ... We needed the best of Woody Allen; instead, we got an artistic crisis.

Woody Allen has made a TV series for Amazon--or rather, he’s taken what might have been a passably mediocre Woody Allen movie and chopped it up into six little partseach clocking in at a little more than 20 minutes, and called it “Crisis in Six Scenes.”

A lot of the qualities that still make Allen’s movies worth watching--especially his gift for crowding a bunch of actors into the frame and giving all of them something interesting to do--are present in Crisis in Six Scenes’ final episode. But the road to get there is so needlessly long, and so pointlessly convoluted, that many viewers will be forgiven for having abandoned it long ago.

Allen’s decampment to television does not really feel like television; although Crisis in Six Scenes is in six episodes, there is little to distinguish it from an overlong Allen film. The episodes do not stand alone, and serialization does not add anything of note to the story.

An overly jokey screenplay that lacks the sharpness of Allen’s best work. And the problem is also Allen, who has largely stopped acting in his own movies. As Sidney, he can be lovably doddering and still delivers the occasional quip with style. But more often, he’s the least compelling character on screen.

If you thought Woody Allen would revolutionize television with his new Amazon series, Crisis in Six Scenes, prepare to be underwhelmed. ... May is the single best reason to watch Crisis in Six Scenes.

The dialogue is stilted, the performances are awkward and most scenes go on twice as long as they should, as if that was the only way Allen could fill enough time for six episodes.

The good news is that Crisis eventually gains a bit of traction in its stretch run, but it’s much too late by then.

Throughout, there are amusing character bits happening on the sidelines, particularly in the glimpses of Kay’s therapy practice (Lewis Black and Becky Ann Baker shine as a disgruntled couple that can’t agree on anything except guacamole), and a book club that includes Joy Behar. But none of this craftsmanship adds up to much when the material is as quarter-baked as it is here.

Crisis in Six Scenes isn't very good. It's compelling in very infrequent, late-episode snippets and stacks up poorly against a plethora of current, artistically ambitious half-hours like FX's Louie, Atlanta, Better Things and You're the Worst; Amazon's own Transparent, Catastrophe, Fleabag and One Mississippi; and Netflix's Master of None, Hulu's Casual and Starz's The Girlfriend Experience.

A tired comedy that feels entirely phoned in.

This too-long drama ends and begins with a domestic bliss that’s both bucolic and deeply uninteresting.

Getting any mileage out of Miley and her Bernardine Dohrn-with-a-husky-voice character proves unrewarding. Most of Crisis is spent listening to Sidney and Kay dither about hearing aids, Freudian analyses, and one-liners that sound dusted off from Allen’s decades-old standup act.

Allen’s simplistic portrait of the 1960s attempts to stir some nostalgia and light laughs and fails. It’s remarkable only for seeming like a lame vignette out of “Love, American Style.”

Woody Allen projects are all walking and talking, so they rise or fall based on the strength of their ideas. This one has none.

The barely coherent babble seems to go absolutely nowhere, obfuscating the anorexic plot nearly to the point of non-existence.