Here and Now

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.

While Here and Now isn’t as engaging as “Six Feet Under,” it has an intriguing quality that invites you to snoop around.

Strange and intriguing.

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.

Here and Now suffers from a self-seriousness that's hard not to laugh at--for the wrong reasons. [2/9 Feb 2018, p.97]

Maddening Here and Now can also be engaging and provocative. The frustration is in never quite knowing what it wants to be.

At times, Here and Now is exhausting. And yet, some of the characters, particularly Ramon and the Muslim family, are fascinating enough for the time being, despite how annoying so many other elements of the show turn out to be.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There is probably a good show somewhere in all this liberal muddle about America, and it will be interesting to see if Ball can find it before viewers get tired of the rudderlessness.

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.

There are moments in Here and Now that threaten to turn the corner and reward a viewer’s patience. But just as quickly, things bog down again. The acting isn’t at fault, but the preachments and overall ponderousness are.

If HBO was looking for a “This Is Us” with nudity, “Here and Now” is an aimless, unsatisfying result.

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.

Sadly, the first four episodes are--despite a very HBO combination of worldly themes and super-horny sex scenes--more of an irritant than an intoxicant.

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.

Laughably self-important. [5-18 Feb 2018, p.11]

Here and Now is so preoccupied with checking off representative boxes that it forgets to whip up actual drama. There's little plot, no aesthetic distinctiveness, and no sense of casualness or specificity to the series.

Four episodes in, we haven’t made much process toward finding out whether Ramon is mentally ill or a harbinger of future times; what’s worse, nearly halfway through the first season, we’re still not invested enough to care.

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."

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.

Watching pedantic debates play out among poorly developed characters is both boring and predictable. It’s as if someone brought my post-election Facebook feed to life — a “Black Mirror” premise that should never happen.

It’s plenty ambitious, but an ambitious failure, where the more you make like Greg and try to think about what the characters are thinking, the more unbearable most of it becomes.

Mostly, Here and Now is a pedantic, torturous mess that's a waste of its great cast and its creator, Alan Ball.

Here and Now feels like a rough draft for a TV show that never got refined into a coherent premise. I’ve sat through four hours of it, and I still don’t quite know what it is... other than not worth your time.

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.

A dreadful misfire ... [Checking off boxes] is all the show does, with no indication that further episodes will get better or worse. It just kind of sits there, surrounded in snide dialogue and hollow gestures of concern.