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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
8
Mixed:
12
Negative:
11
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Critic Reviews
Feb 8, 2018
Season 1 Review:
Here and Now is franker, more unyielding [than NBC's This is Us] and, as a result, more suited to a tough historical moment. This show’s willingness to go for baroque, adding on oddity with gusto, recalls the best and--in moments--worst of Six Feet Under. That show’s narrative excesses, applied without real purpose, eventually fell flat. But Here and Now sets forth more confidently.
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Feb 7, 2018
Season 1 Review:
It’s key to the theme of the series, really: that there are real lives and real emotions struggling to break through the social pressure and detritus of contemporary life. Those struggles are what draws us in to this complicated world to root for Ball’s precious and flaw creations.
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Feb 8, 2018
Season 1 Review:
The damn thing is irritating, intelligent, well-acted, infuriating, self-righteous, curious, inadvertently funny, and pretentious, and Holly Hunter is in it. ... So why is Here and Now so watchable? Because the performances are terrific, and Ball, for all his miserablism, knows how to write scenes that exert an emotional pull. Hunter and Robbins are superb as the parents, and in the four episodes I watched, Lee’s Duc and Zovatto’s Ramon were standout players.
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Feb 12, 2018
Season 1 Review:
The show flexes its political correctness so hard, it forgets the most important part of TV drama is showing, not telling. That changes, for a few moments next week, when Ashley and Kristen are arrested and suffer far different ordeals from a booking officer. It’s a welcome rarity, and proof Ball can craft compelling drama, when he chooses to. Most of the characters on Here and Now self-medicate. You might feel the same urge after spending some time with this fractured family.
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Feb 9, 2018
Season 1 Review:
I've watched nearly half of Here and Now, and I have no idea where it's going or how ambiguous the paranormal elements will turn out to be. ... And then there is Bacon, whose lovely, lightly inhabited, lively performance anchors the show in a more ordinary, yet highly individual reality.
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Feb 8, 2018
Season 1 Review:
In the first four episodes, Here and Now suffers from wanting to cover too many topics. By episode four, the characters start to become less annoying, but that's asking viewers to be patient in a world where there are hundreds of other shows to watch. The main problem, in the early going, at least, is that "Here and Now" feels less like a drama with fully developed characters than an essay on The Way We Live Now, with doomstruck observations about the difficulties of finding harmony among races, cultures, genders, and so on.
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Feb 8, 2018
Season 1 Review:
Running parallel to the family Sturm und Drang is a mystery, possibly supernatural in nature, involving hallucinations on Ramon’s part that seem to connect him to his Iranian-American psychiatrist (Peter Macdissi). Reminiscent of the brain condition that gave Peter Krause’s character visions in “Six Feet Under,” this story strand provides some reason to watch, along with Mr. Robbins’s affable performance and the overall polish always supplied by Mr. Ball, who wrote the first two episodes and directed the first. It remains to be seen, though, whether there’s anything new about Mr. Ball’s new reality.
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IndieWireFeb 8, 2018
Season 1 Review:
Here and Now is filled with compelling performances, specifically from Macdissi and Hunter, but they can’t overcome an unnerving sense of artificiality. From the characters built around talking points to the family dynamic itself, the whole show feels written--overwritten.
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Feb 1, 2018
Season 1 Review:
Ambitiousness is not a problem with Here and Now. But there are definite issues in the four episodes HBO sent for review as the series tries to figure out, without much success, just what show it wants to be. ... When Here and Now focuses on Ramon (and Henry) or the Shokrani family, it has extra depth.
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Feb 12, 2018
Season 1 Review:
Like so many prestige dramas right now, then, Here and Now lacks a strong reason for any of its individual episodes to exist. The show is just a chronicle of stuff that happens to this family, with a vague promise that something important will happen somewhere along the line.
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TV Guide MagazineFeb 1, 2018
Season 1 Review:
Laughably self-important. [5-18 Feb 2018, p.11]
Feb 13, 2018
Season 1 Review:
Unfortunately Here and Now takes great pains to fulfill its title as a drama, albeit a bad one with inadvertent overtones of assigning a magical otherness to the non-white characters in its cast, Ramon in particular. A bigger disappointment, though, is the fact that it’s a generally well-acted hour with a few characters worth following. ... Spending several episodes with it made me want to scream "Get out."
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Feb 8, 2018
Season 1 Review:
The series eschews any of the qualities that might have made its kind of overreaching portrayal redemptive--the humor of caricature, the illuminating bite of satire, or any empathy worth mentioning. An arranged marriage of “This Is Us” and “Stranger Things,” Mr. Ball’s program plays as straightforward drama, albeit one that exploits America’s already caustic stew of the woke, the overtly racist and the great mass in between. It’s not even deliberate parody. It’s inadvertent cartoon.
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Feb 9, 2018
Season 1 Review:
The result is an insufferable ten-episode HBO series that’s trying very hard to speak to the mood of our times but ultimately does not have anything significant to say about it. ... It seems pretty clear that we would be better off spending that present on something other than watching Here and Now.
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RogerEbert.comFeb 7, 2018
Season 1 Review:
It’s a domestic drama with unbelievable dialogue, which just makes it as hollow as anything I’ve seen on television in a long time. It’s a show with almost no subtlety and yet almost no plot--which is almost a feat within itself. The real tragedy is that there are beats that are likable--I enjoyed most of the growing relationship between Ramon and Henry, because it felt genuine, but so much of Here and Now does not.
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