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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
13
Mixed:
13
Negative:
3
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Critic Reviews
TV Guide MagazineSep 13, 2018
Season 1 Review:
This eight-episode series created by Beau Willimon has all the right stuff. Sean Penn, in his first TV series regular role, delivers a tremendously affecting performance. ... Some genre fans may gripe it takes the show too long to achieve liftoff, but that's the point. [17-30 Sep 2018, p.24]
Sep 14, 2018
Season 1 Review:
Not all of the series’ risks pay off, and the overall approach is so counterintuitive that it’s bound to frustrate audiences who expected more of a problem-solving space mission story along the lines of Apollo 13 or The Martian. ... But once you get used to The First’s peculiar rhythms, it weaves a spell that’s somewhere between a ’90s John Wells drama (think ER or The West Wing) and a slowed-down TV answer to Terrence Malick (The Tree of Life especially).
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Sep 11, 2018
Season 1 Review:
Hagerty and Ingram do, at times, veer toward predictability but it doesn’t impede the series overall feel (and, let’s face it, this is a series that needs viewers to be emotionally invested in its characters.) Willimon’s writing, pacing and sense of place, so evident in “House of Cards” (particularly in Seasons 1 and 2) resonates here.
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RogerEbert.comSep 17, 2018
Season 1 Review:
Enamored with its characters to a possible fault, The First is cut and paced like the roughly 368-minute director’s cut; you can imagine a two-hour film, probably with the same budget, that hits the same emotional beats and divides audiences like previous high-concept sci-fi stories like "Contact" did. As is, The First is a noble, ambitious series, but one that demands equally ambitious viewers.
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Sep 12, 2018
Season 1 Review:
The series builds well after its stop-and-start beginning. It reminds you that before House of Cards went off the rails with soap opera high jinks and Kevin Spacey hamminess, it was a promising show about the personal cost of power. Think of The First similarly, rather than as Mars Trek, and you could be intrigued.
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Sep 4, 2018
Sep 17, 2018
Season 1 Review:
The scenes with Hagerty and Denise dominate the show to a disproportionate extent, and to the detriment of lots of other things The First wants to do. Penn is solid and stolid as Hagerty, conveying more depth in the scenes with his family than he does with his crew. What’s missing is a sense of why he wants so badly to be the first man on Mars. ... That said, when Hagerty and his crew finally make it into orbit, the series clicks into place.
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Sep 13, 2018
Season 1 Review:
The First is a glossy, often-inert tale of devotion and spaceflight. Its first two episodes treat inevitabilities as questions, and unfold with the zip of a DVR-ed sporting event for which you already read the box score. ... But The First does get better after its first two episodes (before getting worse again) by jettisoning inevitability. ... As flawed as I found the first season, I’ll admit, it hooked me enough that I’m interested to see how they live life on Mars.
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Sep 14, 2018
Season 1 Review:
[The First] has all the right ingredients of another breakthrough drama series from the streaming service that gave us “The Handmaid’s Tale.” But it becomes so entangled in the human drama of its troubled characters here on Earth that it loses momentum soon after blast off.
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Sep 13, 2018
Season 1 Review:
The First is under no burden to be as quippy or feel-good as The Martian, as awestruck as The Right Stuff, as gee-whiz as Apollo 13 or From the Earth to the Moon. But it needs to have some compelling reason to tell this story, in this way, and it never really finds one.
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Sep 13, 2018
The Daily BeastSep 4, 2018
Season 1 Review:
It’s shot beautifully, is occasionally engagingly weird, and is well-acted by Penn and McElhone, especially. The issue is that it’s just fine. It’s the kind of show you could quickly watch every episode of--Hulu will release all eight episodes at once--and then completely forget you ever saw. It makes that little of an emotional impression, and does nothing particularly remarkable, revolutionary, or resonant with its storytelling.
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Sep 14, 2018
Season 1 Review:
Hulu’s slow-going and disappointingly dreary astronaut drama. ... Far too much narrative flourish. It’s easy to see what Willimon is going for--to give shape and heart to what is essentially a story of science and bureaucracy. It’s also easy to see the mistake in the formula: Empathy does not equal velocity.
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ColliderSep 4, 2018
Season 1 Review:
At every turn, The First is far more interested in lingering shots of Tom in pensive thought, or delivering a monologue about man’s destiny for space travel, or grieving for his dead wife. And perhaps that would’ve been fine if the show had something else to offer, but it also misses the mark in telling a genuinely compelling story about space travel.
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