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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
10
Mixed:
14
Negative:
8
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Critic Reviews
ColliderSep 14, 2020
Season 1 Review:
Every actor is dutifully committed, even if some of the characters are little more than broadly drawn cartoon characters, the stories are energetically told (even when some of the episodes are over an hour long) and the entire mood and atmosphere of the show is wholly enveloping. For something so bleak and macabre, Ratched really is a lot of fun.
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Sep 14, 2020
Season 1 Review:
The drama (all eight episodes were provided for review) never seems to settle on whether this corrupt and eccentric woman is the hero or the villain of her own story, the aggressor or the victim. Watching Sarah Paulson navigate those extremes is chilling. ... These inconsistencies work together to make Nurse Ratched more terrifying in her unpredictability. ... But where Ratched really shines is through its stylized love of gore.
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Sep 17, 2020
Season 1 Review:
“Ratched” is garish and gorgeous all at the same time; horrific and occasionally poetic; glamorous to an almost laughable degree; thrilling for a while and then puzzingly dull for stretches, only to become interesting all over again. The show is a fine and flawed example of who Murphy is and what he makes. You can’t help but be lured in by it.
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Sep 17, 2020
Season 1 Review:
Not a great show by any stretch, because it does suffer from the same narrative bloat that plagues many of Murphy’s other series; there’s simply too much going on here for any one story to be fully satisfying. There’s something entertainingly bold about its vision, and the Crayola-bright world these characters inhabit is a fascinating one—almost despite itself. Ratched is kind of a mess, yes, but can be a compulsively watchable one.
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Nov 30, 2020
Season 1 Review:
Sharon Stone is a vengeful heiress and that’s all she is; Corey Stoll is an incompetent hitman and that sums him up. This isn’t acting, it’s posing. Happily Judy Davis and Sophie Okonedo — both Oscar nominees — do eventually develop juicy parts. And “Ratched” becomes watchable entertainment. But that style-over-content thing makes you wonder if Ryan Murphy shows would be better off with less Ryan Murphy.
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TV Guide MagazineSep 28, 2020
Season 1 Review:
When it's not being too gross to watch or too ridiculous to matter, this series is a treat for the eyes. [28 Sep - 11 Oct 2020, p.9]
Sep 17, 2020
Season 1 Review:
Thanks to the compelling work of Sarah Paulson, one of Murphy’s regulars, Mildred isn’t a completely absurd construct whose sexual role play is out of left field; she’s intensely present and motivated in each scene. But when you step back to understand Mildred, the pieces don’t fit together. ... In this slick, inconsistent series she’s more a jumble of qualities whose truths are coyly withheld from us.
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Sep 14, 2020
Season 1 Review:
Your mileage may vary on how well it explores that idea and the cheap, convenient plot devices that pad it out into eight episodes, but if it’s a spectacle you want, that’s what Ratched somewhat delivers in its performances and production design. The overall narrative could have used a second opinion, though.
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Sep 18, 2020
Season 1 Review:
The resulting character, swoony in love, a loyal if misguided friend, a competent administrator, a practitioner only of techniques she believes help, is more sympathetic, but also more banal. No longer a chilling avatar of implacable, self-satisfied state violence who needs no reason to exist other than that the system will always find people like her to keep running, Nurse Ratched is now just another poor, misunderstood antihero.
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The TelegraphSep 18, 2020
Season 1 Review:
There is no order or sense to the way Paulson behaves. What to say about the portrayal of mental illness, except that the usually reliable Sophie Okonedo hams it up royally as a character with multiple-personality disorder? “She’s lost her mind. I think she’s lost several of ’em,” says Nurse Bucket, which just about sums up the show’s subtlety.
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Sep 18, 2020
Season 1 Review:
In the latest bastardization of intellectual property, producer Ryan Murphy's Ratched is basically "American Horror Story: Cuckoo's Nest," a sort-of prequel starring Sarah Paulson as the quietly unbending nurse from "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," casting her into a florid sea of stylish noir excess. Big, showy roles from a star-studded cast abound, but it's mostly in the service of glossy garbage.
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Sep 16, 2020
Season 1 Review:
If a stylish thrill ride is what you want, “Ratched” may do the job. It’s a wild drive through the dark in a pristinely restored roadster, even if the driver often seems to forget the destination. But if you’re actually looking for what “Ratched” promises, a nuanced explanation of a woman who’s been caricatured as a demon, you may find yourself wishing that you could have met Mildred Ratched before “Ratched” got to her.
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Sep 16, 2020
Season 1 Review:
Ratched is a bunch of disparate influences (the score periodically quotes Elmer Bernstein’s Cape Fear theme, among others) thrown together simply because they could be, and not because they fit together, or add up to more as a group than they did individually. The Nurse Ratched from the film would not approve.
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RogerEbert.comSep 14, 2020
Season 1 Review:
Though the quality and consistency of "Ratched'"s writing dramatically deteriorates around its midpoint, Paulson’s dedication to finding the pulse inside the brittleness of the ice queen archetype makes her compulsively watchable—and the first four episodes, at least, give her a main through-line that is worthy of that performance. ... The show takes a hard pivot, as if it’s auditioning to be some secret season of "American Horror Story" and indulges in that series’ worse impulses.
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Sep 16, 2020
Season 1 Review:
Yes, the production design is breathtaking and the campy dialogue provides a few dark laughs, and the actors are clearly having a good time taking juicy bites out of the material, but the histrionics become tedious and there are far more gross-out moments than genuinely frightening developments. The end result is one big bloody bore.
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IndieWireSep 21, 2020
Season 1 Review:
“Ratched” is a far cry from a faithful prequel to the landmark book and film it’s inspired by, but far more troublesome is how bad the series is on its own. Forget the IP; these first eight episodes don’t hold together as, well, anything. Part ’40s melodrama, part early aughts torture porn, “Ratched” isn’t frightening, affecting, or even all that interesting. It’s thrown together folly and nothing sticks.
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Sep 21, 2020
Season 1 Review:
It takes all eight episodes for Ratched’s sibling heist to come to fruition, but by that time the plot has become so convoluted that it barely matters. ... Perhaps this is the central weakness of “Ratched”: there is nothing bubbling underneath the surface. Romansky and Murphy throw everything at the screen, and all at once.
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Sep 21, 2020
Season 1 Review:
What "Ratched" has in excess, which is saying something, are grand performances from extraordinary actors playing the hell out of parts that don't live up to their talents. ... But what came out of the other end of this treatment is an unhatched egg of a narrative entirely consumed by style.
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Sep 14, 2020
Season 1 Review:
It will surprise no one familiar with the Murphy brand of horror to know that Paulson crushes the material she’s given, and that the physical world she and her costars inhabit is uniquely lush, peculiar and macabre. It’s a shame, then, that it’s also frustratingly opaque, gratuitously unpleasant and shortsighted in its attempts to be as grim and grisly as possible. By the season finale, anyone asking why we needed a Nurse Ratched backstory like this may walk away even more confused.
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Sep 15, 2020
Season 1 Review:
Ultimately, Ratched fails to deliver not just because it doesn't have a handle on its lead and can’t locate its horror, but because it has limited vision and poor follow-through. The elements of this story are so inelegantly mashed together that they may as well have come out of a blender.
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Sep 18, 2020
Season 1 Review:
Nothing in Ratched works. Not the overbearing score desperately trying to replicate the splendor of Bernard Herrmann’s work with Alfred Hitchcock. Not the consistent insistence on shoving various shades of green into every frame. Not the acting, even when executed by performers who have been dynamic elsewhere. Not the rudderless scripts. ... There is nothing redeemable to be found within the folds of these eight hours of television. Nothing!
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