Dollface

Intended as a modern comic spin on Ibsen's A Doll's House, Dollface is funny enough, though it mostly misses the feminist boat. It more closely resembles a little-watched FXX surrealist comedy of sexual manners called Man Seeking Woman, in which clueless characters conversed regularly with their own ids as they plotted blundering romantic strategy.

The simplicity of Dollface doesn't make the show any less fun, although this slenderly conceived comedy vehicle for "2 Broke Girls" star Kat Dennings could easily have landed on a conventional broadcast network. As is, it's a nice addition to Hulu's lineup of originals, and a whole lot less depressing than "The Handmaid's Tale."

Dollface can be frustratingly overdrawn, without the painful precision of PEN15 or radically empathetic heart of Shrill, both fellow Hulu shows similarly interrogating millennial womanhood.

In our age of specialized, personalized entertainment, there are less pleasant propositions than the offer of spending time with an ephemeral half-hour starring a team of actors who demonstrate crisp comedic timing and manage to be engaging despite the show's average scripts.

These surreal asides are fun and cheeky, and they sometimes skewer the dumb social constraints of being a woman. But they are also frustratingly imprecise, and when the show goes too long without one, the emotional blankness of Jules’s world becomes too apparent.

Dollface remains energetic—and exuberantly weird—throughout the season. ... Her friends eventually get their own plots, setting up a versatile hangout comedy with the potential to outlive the initial breakup storyline. If only the show’s tone and characters felt more consistent across episodes, once other screenwriters are in the mix.

The entire cast of Dollface, right down to a tremendous string of guest actors, is so great that the prevailing feelings watching the first season's 10 half-hour episodes are occasional mirth and consistent certainty that they could all be put to better use.

The world of women in Dollface is Pinterest-ready but neither deeply felt nor illuminating about the modern business of being a woman. Dennings has a warm, spiky presence that in and of itself is fun to watch, but she isn’t enough to surmount the issues troubling the show, namely the lack of chemistry between Jules and the rest of the cast.

Individually, these characters work fine, but together, they're a headache, and that's a problem when the whole point of the show is proving that girl squads — their words, not mine — can have each other's backs no matter what and men don't define them.

At-best amusing, at-worst infuriating comedy that misses far more than it hits. ... This is a great cast of women, trapped in a series made by a bunch of obviously talented people who will almost certainly go on to make smart, funny, daring, bold things. This isn’t one of them.

The whole project has a lot of embroidery — up to and including the spirit guide of sorts who leads Dennings’s Jules towards self-awareness, a cute cat who dispenses half-formed jokes in the voice of Beth Grant — but very little in the way of real insight. ... In all, its vision of friendship and its aesthetic of goofy quirk feels that worst thing for a would-be viral hit: Late.