Mr. Corman

A show that resists immediacy, but rewards patience. These opening episodes don’t do it justice. But stick with it, and you will find a promising, prickly newcomer.

Over the course of its 10 half-hour-ish installments, Mr. Corman never nails an overall narrative momentum or achieves true consistency, but the second half of the season features a few smartly conceived episodes and several audacious visual flourishes. It gets better.

Good intentions are commendable, even if Josh’s painfully slow acknowledgement makes for impenetrable packaging. Spending five-plus hours watching a very average man inch toward slightly greater self-awareness doesn’t make for the most powerful TV experience.

[Josh's] depressive narcissism is central to the story, and it might have felt the honest thing to make him such a determined little rain cloud, and the actor does not hold back. But it also puts a black hole at the center of the story, one hard to care about. ... At the same time, Gordon-Levitt has surrounded himself with great players and given them good scenes to play.

There’s nothing wrong with telling small stories on television. Many of the multihyphenate shows which Mr. Corman resembles are all about smallness. This small story, though, doesn’t feel worthy of the time it takes to experience it, nor the varied talents put on display by its creator, writer, director, and star.

“Mr. Corman” is an unwieldy, inconsistent show that sometimes clicks together as a result of its big creative swings, but mostly suffers because of their irregularity.