And yet again do we have a show that makes us ask ourselves one question:
Are we willing to buy into its unlikely premise?
If you haven't seen the first episode, the next paragraph will contain spoilers, so watch out for the,
spoiler warnings, if you don't want too much information.
*** Spoiler Start ***
Neil and Grace are a married couple with a daughter, him working as anAnd yet again do we have a show that makes us ask ourselves one question:
Are we willing to buy into its unlikely premise?
If you haven't seen the first episode, the next paragraph will contain spoilers, so watch out for the,
spoiler warnings, if you don't want too much information.
*** Spoiler Start ***
Neil and Grace are a married couple with a daughter, him working as an investment broker,
her being a housewive trying to get back into a career as an architect.
Both are not satisfied with their lives and while Neil looses his nerve and snaps on an airplane and
in his bosses office with the risk of loosing his job, Grace calls an escort from time to time for..uhm...sex.
Neil finds out about the escort and accidentally gets hold of the guys smartphone using it to try out being
an escort himself. The escort, of course, doesn't like this at all.
This will turn in into a plotline involving Neil and the escort having an escalating conflict.
*** Spoiler End **
This is the basic setup which doesn't simply have the problem that it's hard to believe,
but has more problems, the biggest having to do with the marriage problems itself and with the character of Grace.
Firstly, we are not seeing any real marital problems. They're basically both bored because things
aren't fresh anymore after 20 years of marriage. Who can blame them?
Yet we don't see absolutely no effort of realising the problem, talking about it and do same
marriage counseling, for example.
This has, for the most part, to do with Grace. She's almost an enigma.
We don't know anything about her except she isn't satisfied with the marriage and wants to work as an architect, and that's it.
We get no idea what she wants from Neil and the marriage. When she interacts with Neil, she shows almost no emotions.
The show tries to make us believe that the problem is her lack of fulfillment in a job,
but that's BS. We know that being successful in your job doesn't lead to a happy marriage by itself.
Additionally the show focuses on Neil being the one responsible for the problems and him trying to change.
But Grace doesn't do anything for the relationship. She isn't willing to talk about the problems
even when Neil asks her whether she would tell him, if she had a problem.
Grace has a sister, so that character could be used to put in some scenes with the two talking about
Grace's marriage, so we could understand Grace better. No such thing.
I came to the conclusion, that this is all deliberately done by the writers to keep the unlikely plot going.
Only as long as Grace is kind of like a black hole, emotionally, guaranteeing no progress
in dealing with the marital problems, this show is able to keep on going.
If you can live with that, ok, but I call this a sham.
The show is constructed in a way that I can't simple accept the unbelievable premise and get on with it,
but I constantly have to question the credibility of the plot and I have to swallow that premise
over and over again.
Again and again, I ask myself: 'Ok, they have some not very severe marital problems, but how
does that turn into this specific plotline that is constantly on the verge of spinning out of control?
What? A party with everybody wearing masks? What's going on here, how did we get here?'.
This show isn't bad at all, on the contrary, it's watchable.
But I simply don't buy into it. Facing all those unlikely events happening, maybe a certain amount
of humor would help, since the show lacks any kind of humor.
I just think, that the unbelievable plotlines aren't matched by the heft of some real marital problems,
making the the latter simply a lazy pretence for the former.… Expand
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