Reprisal

If only the narrative were up to the task of meeting the show’s witty and elastic visuals. Strip away the window dressing, and there’s not a lot of heart or complexity to Reprisal’s attempt to turn the wronged-woman trope into a broader universe capable of sustaining itself for multiple seasons. ... Still, it’s engaging in a pulpy, soapy way, fun despite its messy structure and slippery consistency.

If you like the combination of violent action, sentimental fantasy, literary pretension and periodic slapstick humor that “Reprisal” offers, you may enjoy it well enough. Or you may wish you were watching something with the energy of “Banshee,” the clammy atmosphere of “Quarry” or the charm of “Hap and Leonard.”

Reprisal would be a lot of fun if it were 100 minutes long. Unfortunately, it's 10 episodes, some of which are fully an hour long. Reprisal suffers from the same problem so many shows in the Peak TV era do: Not enough story to justify the runtime.

Through seven episodes of its 10-episode first season, Reprisal is a fascinating and audacious series, absolutely a work of some vision. It's also questionably paced, only sporadically involving and, as interesting as its women are, its male characters are a bland and interchangeable blob of facial hair and tattoos and, in that capacity, steal the spotlight all too frequently.

The publicists for Hulu's new revenge drama Reprisal's describe it as "hyper-noir." Actually, it's more an object lesson in how those two terms can't be used together. Film noir is darkly underlit, a creature of the shadows. Its dialogue is cynical but clever. Though its sexuality may be frenzied, it's about seduction, not rape. "Hyper" implies the opposite: Garish. Extreme. Grating. Which is actually a fairly good description of Reprisal. Throw in "charmless" and "crude" and you've pretty much painted the whole picture.