- Network: HULU
- Series Premiere Date: Sep 16, 2021
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Critic Reviews
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While it’s clear that Novak has a take on the big topics, his script largely serves as a canvas for a cadre of quick-witted, deliciously entertaining characters—played by titans like Lucas Hedges, Jon Bernthal, Daniel Dae-Kim, Kaitlyn Dever, and Tracee Ellis Ross. ... The script twists around drama-comedy corners in an altogether promising showcase of dexterity.
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The new FX on Hulu anthology series “The Premise” is problematic but has promise. ... While some chapters are told in broad, mostly comedic strokes that result in hit-and-miss storytelling, the most effective episodes play out in more dramatic and realistic fashion. ... The most powerful episode in the series is “Moment of Silence,” with Jon Bernthal giving one of the most effective performances of his career as Chase Milbrandt
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Some will accuse Novak of taking easy swings at low-hanging piñatas about to burst with mockable topics, and he’s already been scolded for doing so from a privileged perspective, with symbolic more than fully fleshed-out characters. Regardless, the premises within “The Premise” yield stories crafted with care and played-out with sincere commitment — even when it’s all in the service of snide irony.
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One thing all five episodes have in common: They’re smart, thought-provoking and worth watching.
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"The Premise" is the rare type of anthology that's far more hit than miss—if one piece of an episode doesn't work, there's something else happening on screen that will keep you watching.
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The ultimate worthiness of The Premise taking up your time is going to be based on your individual patience level for uneven storytelling. And that’s a shaky premise to build a series upon.
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Even though the first episode of The Premise was uneven, there was enough there to make us want to watch the other episodes. Mainly we want to see if the big swings Novak takes in each episode connect, or if they’re admirable strike outs.
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The Premise would do better to simply commit to its white-centric myopia rather than occasionally and clumsily gesturing toward peripheral people of color. Though the series shows some insight into the hypocrisy of its subjects, it seems oblivious to its flattening of marginalized characters into little more than bystanders to some white person’s mess.
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Novak is probably still best-known for having once been a writer, producer, and actor on The Office, which makes The Premise’s failures as comedy all the more frustrating. Oddly, the series is much, much better when it’s playing straight.
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Novak is an accomplished writer and actor, best known for the US version of The Office, but The Premise seems to take novel ideas and flatten them out.
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Novak is an accomplished writer and actor, best known for the US version of The Office, but The Premise seems to take novel ideas and flatten them out.
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Real tension is only felt in two episodes, though: the aforementioned “Butt Plug” and “Moment of Silence,” both of which are buoyed by strong performances from their leads and a greater sense of storytelling focus. ... That’s what The Premise really is: a series of episodes that each have their own gimmick. “Moment of Silence,” at least, is smart enough to not try to be funny. The other episodes try too hard and, too often, fail.
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[The five episodes critics were given] can be exasperating and confusing, but also intriguing. At times, it’s god-awful, and at others genuinely good. But the shifts in tone and execution from episode to episode — or even scene to scene within certain episodes — feel incredibly jarring, even when The Premise seems close to achieving its full potential.
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A few interesting performances from an ensemble that’s too talented for this show save it from complete disaster, but every single one of the five episodes of “The Premise” takes an admittedly interesting idea and almost stubbornly refuses to explore it, as if the very experiment of this series is one in shallow writing.
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The half-hour anthology series suffers from an inability to take most of its own thought exercises all that seriously, resulting in logical inconsistencies, tonal unevenness and no small amount of smugness.
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Most of the episodes feature lengthy, clumsy bits of dialogue or monologue that feel ripped from the daily concerns — and the ranty, discursive way of talking at, not to, one’s followers — of social media. ... Only one episode here seems to get at what “The Premise” was trying to do — create, through storytelling ratcheted past the point of plausibility, a situation that places a frame around certain intractable sensations of living in this moment.