Low Winter Sun

Low Winter Sun grabs you by the lapels and pulls you--forcefully--right into its seamy, low-rent world of intrigue and double- and triple-crosses.

Terrifically hard to love, but some superb performances indicate that at least it's worth the effort to try.

The drama's just as intense as [Mark] Strong, who's clearly earned his last name. [9 Aug 2013, p.73]

Not since HBO’s The Wire left the air five years ago has a television series combined urban decay and moral decrepitude in such stark--and yet compulsively watchable--terms.

[A] promising mix of urban decay, moral corruption and brutal betrayal that’s likely to fuel Sun.

While scenes with a crime crew drag, in part because it's not always clear what's going on with them, anytime the focus shifts to crooked cops Frank Agnew (Mark Strong) and Joe Geddes (Lennie James), Low Winter Sun proves to be a gripping drama with a vibe most reminiscent of "The Wire."

Its sometimes distracting and oppressive aspirations aside, Low Winter Sun does nevertheless strike me as promising, solid at its core, powered by plausible cross-purposes. Strong and James are excellent.

Low Winter Sun makes you want to watch for the potential, but a little more sun (or dark humor) to offset the This Is Serious tone would go a long way in encouraging that potential to be realized.

There's lots of snarling, lots of talk about what men are willing to do to protect or hurt one another, and yet in the early going it feels empty, like a joke being retold by someone who can't remember exactly how the guy he heard it from delivered it. The performances are terrific, though (James especially), and Dickerson shoots the Detroit locations in a fashion that captures both the beauty of the architecture and the absolute bleakness of the setting.

Low Winter Sun is a good show with the potential to grow into a very good show.

Low Winter Sun is so clotted with bleak cityscapes, shadowy interiors and brooding portent that the narrative sags under the weight of all that mood-setting.

Low Winter Sun goes for a mood darker than noir. It's atmospheric, but the air it generates is noxious.

Low on initial appeal and likewise short on originality, it’s a bleak ’n’ grim undertaking that just doesn’t seem built for the long haul.

The gutted-out city is perhaps the show's most compelling character. [26 Aug 2013, p.38]

The performances really are good, almost good enough to make the hokey dialogue believable, but not quite good enough to make Low Winter Sun a must-see when there are so many other shows--about cops and otherwise--that do this moral ambiguity thing much better.

It’s a fascinating visual ride. But without heroes worth rooting for or a victim worth avenging, the rubble heaps of an imploded metropolis can only do so much heavy lifting.

Low Winter Sun too often lingers on Detroit's colorless evil more than its spirited righteousness, resulting in an overwhelmingly bleak narrative that feels as cold and lifeless as a corpse.

Sun, a series adaptation of a British miniseries (which also starred Mark Strong) is, after the two episodes I’ve seen, a unremarkable in itself: a paint-by-the-numbers serious-cable series where all the numbers indicate a shade of black.

Sun aspires to the breadth if not the depth of The Wire. But it's so self-conscious in its existential misery, lacking the leavening humor and humanity of a modern classic like Breaking Bad, that it often feels more punishing than provocative.

Too much simply rings forced and phony, from the dialogue to the plot to the characters.

For now, Low Winter Sun has created a reasonably compelling universe, without as yet establishing the gravitational pull necessary to ensure viewers stay in its orbit.

It comes off as a straining, overly serious wannabe.

If the show were badly directed, photographed, edited, and acted, at least you could have fun laughing at it, but everyone’s working so hard to put across unremarkable material that the best one can manage is a kind of exhausted empathy.

A situation brimming with the potential for suspense, and irony. Those may yet emerge, if only someone produces a script to make it possible. For the moment, all that is brimming here is the evidence of an ill-advised faith in the drawing power of depressive police dramas.

The drama, which is an adaptation of a U.K. series of the same name, tries way too hard to be a Serious Cable Drama. The strain almost turns it into a parody of the genre.