Room 104

With eerie vibes and plenty of suspense, Room 104 comes off as a fun-house lab for the Duplass duo's most out-there ideas--less mumblecore and more Black Mirror. [21/28 July 2017, p.113]

An often thrilling look at what TV can be when it looks to its past and finds ways to update old formats for the future.

It’s refreshing to watch a story hit all its marks without steering into any unnecessary tangents, and a relief to feel no pressure to catch every episode, since the plot resets every week.

This eclectic series is the answer for those burned out on all the binge-watching. Check in or out when you please. No commitment required.

As with any anthology series, the results are incredibly hit and miss but I appreciate the effort from the front of the room to the back. ... So even though I didn’t like at least half of this sextet, I’m eager to see the other six.

While the series is inconsistent, it offers enough surprises to make it worth opening and reopening the door.

Not every Room 104 story worked for me, but I’m glad I kept going long enough to make it to the dance episode, and the best ones were so powerful that I’ll happily gamble a half-hour at a time on the others. This one simple hotel room can become anything, and when it turns into just the right thing, look out.

Though one of the show’s best qualities is its graceful ability to switch tones and genres, Room 104 seems to be at its most comfortable, not to mention enjoyable, when it focuses on the plausible rather than the implausible.

Room 104 doesn't feel like a Duplass brothers film. The six episodes sent to critics, celebrating a diverse assortment of either lesser-known or lesser-known-to-TV directors, aren't bound by genre or form, and they're mostly pretty good.

The grab bag nature of the anthology format is in full effect: Of the six episodes HBO made available to critics, one is truly great, two are good, two are middling, and one is a fascinating mess.

The worst thing about Room 104 is that it’s completely inconsistent. The most satisfying episodes function like one-act plays, with well-structured narrative arcs and twists and reveals. The most irritating ones feel overly self-indulgent—transparent opportunities for the writers (Mark Duplass wrote seven out of 12) and directors (a notably diverse group) to play around with form. Still, there’s something thrilling about a show that’s so eager to experiment.

Some of Room 104’s episodes do have a sort of half-formed quality to them, built around character relationships that seem like they are just getting started once the episode ends. But for the most part, the series is an intriguing experiment, allowing the Duplasses and their collaborators the chance to explore multiple genres and approaches.

All in all, Room 104 is to be lauded for its adventurousness, but more rigorous attention to quality control could have made it more consistently enthralling.

While some of the episodes--I have not seen all 12--show flashes of creativity, there is something synthetic about the series, like a hotel room’s pretend hominess.

The variety--particularly if you watch them consecutively--shines through. Because it’s such a confined space, directors like Smith have to focus on the acting. The episodes are like little workshops. ... It's like any motel--hit and miss.

The viewer truly doesn’t know what they’ll be getting from week to week. But it also makes Room 104 intensely uneven, with a few stories standing out in a crowd that barely transcends a quality rating of middling.

Room 104 is extremely uneven.

There's something remote and stiflingly preordained about the series, which suggests Playhouse 90 cocooned in a derivative formal polish that stripes it of grit and uncertainty.

They run the gamut from weird to unnerving to poignant.

In letting their freak flag fly, the Duplass boys tried a little too hard to be all things to all genres and ended up creating a series that at best is mildly pleasant and at worst is unoriginal and tiresome.