- Network: Netflix
- Series Premiere Date: Sep 18, 2020
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Critic Reviews
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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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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]
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Because it’s like some 1950s melodrama, “Ratched” is quite attractive initially. ... Instead, it's just a shirttail relative of "American Horror Story," another series that isn't always sure what it wants to do.
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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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Though it occasionally mistakes “scary” for “hard to watch,” Ratched displays a lot more narrative discipline. And yet the whole feels lesser than the sum of its parts. But what parts!
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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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The whole tone of Ratched feels like a point extremely missed, and it can’t even generate its own upside-down gravity. At times, its rudeness is just crude.
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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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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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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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Unfortunately, “Ratched” turns out to be a bloody bore. The eight-episode series is less a character study than it is a horror show, where the gore spills all over nifty period costumes and fancy production design.
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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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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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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.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 26 out of 48
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Mixed: 9 out of 48
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Negative: 13 out of 48
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Sep 19, 2020Masturbating priests and good lesbians.. All in 2 first epidoses... Another disgusting #LGBTNSDAP propaganda.
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Sep 20, 2020
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Sep 19, 2020