- Network: Peacock
- Series Premiere Date: Jan 1, 2023
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Critic Reviews
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Woliner’s aim isn’t to deliberately prank Goldman; instead, what the series represents is the televisual equivalent to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. By engaging with Goldman, and helping him “tell his story,” Woliner, his collaborators, and even the audience are inevitably drawn into the experience; it’s one man’s tale, but by observing it, we’re all somehow a part of it.
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“Paul T. Goldman,” which premieres Sunday, may be difficult to describe adequately, but it’s an easy-to-watch six-parter that unfolds slyly and provocatively.
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As with Nathan Fielder’s work, it’s a funhouse of legitimate and illusory experiences and compulsions, with Goldman—sad, angry, pitiable and absurd—at its hazy center.
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In ways he realizes and others he definitely does not, Paul becomes a civilian Larry David of sorts, thrust into uncomfortable “Curb Your Enthusiasm”-style situations he brings on himself and doesn’t always know how to handle.
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The six-episode series starts as an imaginative twist on the overworked true crime genre, but it eventually devolves into a Threat Level Midnight-style endeavor that lands somewhere between enabling and exploitation.
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The net result is a show that’s as oddly watchable as it is hard to define. If only Quibi had lived to see it.
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An undeniably fascinating, invariably uncomfortable piece of television... I don’t think I laughed once at Paul T. Goldman, but I found its presentation surprising at times, and there’s something compelling to its undercurrent of sadness, especially in light of the ongoing debate over exploitation in the true-crime space.
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It is ridiculous, it is sad, and it is often deeply uncomfortable, even if it’s unclear whether more of our ire should be directed at Goldman or at Woliner, or if we should be mad at all. ... Whatever moral quandaries the show presents, it’s never dull. ... The surface aspects of Paul T. Goldman are definitely fun, maybe enough to carry viewers through the whole thing.
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You may laugh, and you most certainly will cringe, at this forlorn but proud man who fancies himself the hero of his own story. Forgetting him is not an option. [2 - 15 Jan 2023, p.7]
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STREAM IT, but we’re not sure if our recommendation is going to stay that way after the first episode. As the story of Paul T. Goldman gets more outrageous, the less funny we think this meta-meta series is going to be.
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Paul’s undependability is soon matched by Woliner’s. It’s hard not to have qualms about the director setting up his protagonist to receive so much undeserved attention and sympathy, particularly as Paul’s ugliness toward women comes into sharper focus. ... By the end, there’s no reason to trust Woliner any more than his subject.
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Having Goldman play out his story seems at first like a scheme worthy of “Nathan for You,” the series on which Fielder placed notably odd or curious people in situations designed to prise out their unique qualities. Here, though, the game seems a little too obvious, as there’s no second beat here, no reason to have Goldman play it all out other than to explore an unusual personality. For a show with a premise that seems chewily self-referential, here, too much of the motivation in finding Goldman a perfect subject seems to exist on the surface.