Star

The three episodes I've seen are, like Star herself, a little rough, with a tangle of plotlines and some clunky dialogue. But there is plenty to care about, even if I'm not convinced this girl group has what it takes.

It's all very gritty and unglamorous. Well, as unglamorous as a show interspersed with musical numbers can be. And the musical numbers are very entertaining. But Star is filled with lowest-common denominator dialogue.

If the acting is often raw and the plotting messy, that seems about right. It's too soon for this Star to be polished. [5-18 Dec 2016, p.23]

A prime-time soap that wants to be harder-edged than “Empire,” but instead manages to be less fun.

The musical numbers are the best part of Star, and all three of the young leads seem to have singing talent as well as fresh faces. ... The negative to that is that none of the three is much of an actress, and their weak performances can't give the show the weight or momentum it needs. Awkward dialogue and cliched plots are additional problems.

Star works on a superficial level as a story of showbiz dreams, but its power lies in subverting that fantasy.

Star is the erratic follow-up to Daniels’ onetime monster hit Empire.

It’s a very tentative introduction, made all the more surprising by the fact that Daniels wrote and directed it from his own treatment. It doesn’t foster much confidence, let alone interest, in a series when even its creator is unsure of how to flesh out that world.

Pick through that mess, and even the biggest Daniels skeptic will find a fierce commitment to progressive social issues; a knack for writing showcases for actresses of color that are so often slighted by Hollywood; and a kind of Shakespeare-meets-camp delight for dialogue that is as operatic as it is silly--though only effective about as often as you’d expect with that kind of ambition.

Like Empire, Star is a mess of the first order. It’s just a far less entertaining one.

Moving past Daniels' sometimes tin ear for dialogue--or insistence on saddling actors with clumsy soap dialogue in scenes that are staged as naturalistic--wouldn't hurt the actors, because it's hard to find praise for Destiny, O'Grady or Demorest, each struggling with broad or inconsistent character introductions.

Perhaps Star will evolve and hit some higher notes in future episodes. But its premiere hour is mostly a patchwork quilt of fairly effective performance segments and threadbare storylines.

Unfortunately, Star subverts everything with hollow heaviness and familiar cynicism.

If Daniels had put more emphasis on the polish of his artifice and gave the show’s aesthetic the same bombast that it’s tawdry, openly cheesy dialogue gives the story, Star might have proven to be a subversive, infuriated series. It’s overall look, however, is more chintzy than anything else, wrecked with soft focus and lazy, unconvincing you-are-there camerawork.