Here and Now

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.