Hand of God

The show’s reach may exceed its grasp, but the cast succeeds in selling a farfetched premise.

Four episodes in, I can't say I've warmed to Watkins' dark and not always coherent vision. But there's a crackling electricity between his characters that's kept me watching.

[A] fascinating, if uneven, new drama,

There are enough flourishes surrounding Pernell’s visions to maintain viewer interest, but after a while the pilot feels like a slog.

Hand of God, while smoothly made, nice to look at and mostly well-acted, is also a cautionary example of the pitfalls of the new style of serialized drama. It’s trying to do several things at once, but it doesn’t feel particularly layered or complex.

Despite frequent predictability and other issues, though, we do get pulled into the story. Even if we don’t always believe the characters, or huge swaths of dialogue, we do want answers, to the crimes, yes, but also to whether the judge is a nutcase or the only sane person in San Vicente.

It’s clear Watkins has ideas to spare, but he struggles to make meaningful drama with them.

Dillahunt and Corinealdi are the only members of the cast who manage to shine through the deeply flawed writing. It’s not even so much the writing, which isn’t bad on its face, but the ideas behind it.

There’s a much more entertaining but less intensely violent show buried in Hand of God somewhere.

Watching the first hour of Hand of God, the performances are solid but the shocking moments fail to connect dramatically.

Very little that happens is done subtly, and more often than not, the scenes build to a physically and/or emotionally violent crescendo. It’s not boring.... But it’s awfully wearing, like having your nose rubbed in malevolence and turgidity, without offering up enough character drama to make it worthwhile.

Amazon is currently in the "spare no expense" stage of original-content production, and it shows everywhere but in the story. Perlman is a strong and deceptively supple performer, but he isn't a miracle worker. Even bad crazy guys need a gleam of humanity, and Pernell has none. Delaney is mostly sidelined, as are Royo and Tal.... Dillahunt's ability to show this, to swing KD from brutal violence to soul-searching, is miraculous. It just isn't enough.

Hand of God’s bleakness doesn’t serve any greater purpose, and all the bluster says nothing about the nature of faith or revenge. Like its main character, the show ostentatiously wallows in sin and then tries to pass it off as genuine redemption.

This is a show that's unnecessarily bleak, far too impressed with its own edginess, and completely predictable to anyone who's watched television before.

Created by writer Ben Watkins, Hand of God has the pace of a pulp novel anxious to keep an audience watching, heedless of believability or motivation.

It's a rough-edged, cold-blooded, sometimes downright disgusting portrayal of one family's struggle to understand the difference between reality and delusion in a time of crisis.

A thoroughly ill-conceived and unpleasant series.