Mike

“Mike” is neither hagiography nor character assassination. ... Any lingering doubts “Mike” will gloss over some of Tyson’s more monstrous actions are erased in the fifth episode, when the P.O.V. switches to that of Desiree Washington, the 18-year-old Miss Black Rhode Island who was raped by Tyson. ... Titled “Desiree,” is almost like a stand-alone short film, with Li Eubanks bringing empathy, humanity and a heroic spirit to her work as Ms. Washington.

For those without a dog in the hunt, “Mike” should make for compelling TV, broad but by turns compassionate and damning.

Everything feels like a contact high from a recent late-night viewing of a remastered Goodfellas. ... There seems almost too much to explore about the psyche of the man Mike Tyson: there’s the price of celebrity, the personal cost of extreme success, how exploitative systems burn and churn their product.

Mike refuses to equivocate on Tyson’s guilt and, as a result, finally seems ready to reckon with everything that its lead character truly is. And unless they pull their punches, the final three episodes are squared up to deliver a total knock-out.

The series’ creators wanted to give an unbiased look at Tyson’s life, allowing the audience to decide how they feel about him for themselves. It’s a worthwhile experiment.

Not a knockout, that’s for sure. Call it a respectable loss on points. No biting involved.

This is half-way to hagiography, a sympathetic take portraying Iron Mike as a lost little boy who just wants to be loved. It is efficiently made and superficially entertaining.

It would take much more than eight episodes of dramatized headlines to weigh either the enormity of Mike Tyson’s actions or the significance of his legacy. His is a life that resists summarizing, no matter how hard the authorized and unauthorized biographers try.

Mike Tyson's story hardly suffers from a lack of media exposure, so an effort to create a new limited series around the former heavyweight champ entered the ring facing a high bar. Despite a knockout performance by Trevante Rhodes, "Mike" doesn't consistently clear it, offering an episodic, occasionally too-irreverent tone in seeking to portray not just the boxer but those who passed through his orbit.

Outside of a captivating central performance, “Mike” stumbles in the TV ring, unable to really pin down its subject in a way that feels more than merely factual.

Few scenes last long enough to gather any dramatic weight, and relationships are more suggested, or simply stated, than explored. That isn’t to say that some aren’t affecting — the actors see to that, though they must often work against the series’ stylistic breeziness. ... “Mike” does seem intent on ticking off the bullet points of Tyson’s life; its aspirations feel serious, even if the end product doesn’t always measure up.

Sprinting from one big, defining moment to the next, punctuated with boxing scenes that are tertiary to the main tale, it’s hard to figure out what, if anything, the audience is supposed to glean from this immersive exhibit of “This is Your Life: Mike Tyson.” Nothing is revealed, only dramatized, which is certainly entertaining — but illuminating?

Tyson is portrayed by Trevante Rhodes (“Moonlight”), albeit in a thoroughly bewildering performance, and the recollections are dramatically recreated. ... Only five of the series’ eight episodes were made available for review and it is, frankly, impossible to know where it is going, if anywhere.

Rhodes, of “Moonlight” fame, is terrific in the role, nailing both Tyson’s sibilant voice and the air of petulant self-regard that can at times be detected under it. But the show exhibits a certain incuriosity about how various elements will play on camera.

It's the same hysterical-biopic mentality creator Steven Rogers brought to I, Tonya — and Mike reunites Rogers with Tonya director Craig Gillespie, who has not met a popular song he won't cinematically beat to death.

If he [Mike Tyson] watches “Mike,” he’s unlikely to change his mind once he witnesses the thinness of his story as represented here. Still, he’s unlikely to find a portrayal more sympathetic to him, either. And that’s sorta the problem with “Mike.”

Beyond the hollow, uninspired treatment of its subject matter, Mike has the rhythm of a Wikipedia article cut up into little pieces and spliced hastily back together, so schematic and threadbare and depthless that it makes a strong argument to end the conventional Hollywood biopic for good, until someone can figure out how to rewrite and ultimately transcend the formula.

It’s yet another case of style over substance, or at least it is until its fifth episode, when it focuses on the one human about whom it has a clear point of view: Desiree Washington (Li Eubanks). ... Yet in its first five installments, Hulu’s venture paints a portrait that’s less complicated than scattershot and superficial, revisiting Tyson’s rough upbringing and dully illustrating how it molded him into the ferocious fighter and off-the-rails individual he eventually became.

Mike is a Wikipedia entry punctuated by superficial sociological retrospection. Instead of taking us inside Mike Tyson’s head — a place none of us might actually want to spend time — Mike takes us further and further from any unmediated truths about Mike Tyson. It’s a well-acted, flatly told limited series that adds little to the conversation.

We’d rather see a bioseries about Mike Tyson where Tyson is intimately involved, because we’re pretty sure it will have a lot of subtleties about Tyson’s life that Mike lacks. His life deserves better than a series that treats him like a curiosity more than anything else.