Still Star-Crossed

It all chugs along under the basic idea that you don’t need to have too many feelings about what’s actually happening onscreen as long as everything is beautiful to look at--until the final two minutes of the pilot, when two estranged lovers meet in an empty room.

All the familiar boxes are checked off, including the miscommunications that inevitably lead to Romeo and Juliet's deaths, but these sequences are so often scattershot, sloppily edited, or too tightly framed to make any kind of emotional impression. Buried somewhere in the middle of this is the show's actual premise.

The writing is so scattered, it’s hard to find anyone, Montague or Capulet, to root for.

Without some Cliff’s Notes handy, the first half of Monday’s pilot is a muddle as to who’s a Montague and who’s a Capulet. Once Romeo and Juliet die (about halfway through the pilot), Still Star-Crossed improves as the focus shifts to the politics of their deaths and those left behind.

It’s difficult to determine just where the show is going to go, since Juliet (Clara Rugaard) and Romeo (Lucien Laviscount) aren’t dispatched till halfway through the first episode.

What Star-Crossed can't do, at least in the early going, is provide much incentive to care about its characters, despite the appealing Anthony Head and Zuleikha Robinson as Lord and Lady Capulet, Grant Bowler as Lord Montague and Lashana Lynch as Juliet's cousin Rosalind, who gets caught in the middle of a plan to save the fair city of Verona.

Shondaland’s latest product is neither soapy romance nor gut-wrenching tragedy, but a sluggish, stilted mess.

While a tad short of The White Princess, the costuming and pageantry of the show is exemplary (even if some of those castle shots look lifted from Once Upon A Time), so it’s lovely to look at, but hard to follow. And harder still for it to hold your attention. Further episodes will need to amp up something--romance, intrigue, trauma--to grab the audience.

The mix-and-match dialogue has the opposite effect of helping non-theater majors assimilate. It’s awkward and distracts from an already hard-to-follow story. The performances here are also often buried under the dense narrative, not to mention way too many perfunctory sword fights.

While there’s pageantry aplenty, the dialogue is littered with too many lumpy Shakespeare-lite lines and some jarring uses of slang.

It's lavish, multi-racial and a bit of a confusing mess.