The Slap (2015)

As it stands now, The Slap may be one of the few American adaptations of a foreign program that actually works on the same levels as the original.

In the end, it’s all about the stellar cast and the insightful and sharp writing.

Irritating and fascinating, The Slap is unlike anything else on network TV.

The result is a depressing--if engrossing--rehash of arguments found every day online.

The best of The Slap feels like the jazz that Hector loves, riffing on themes instead of hitting them directly on the beat. It helps to have good to great performances all around.

Based on two episodes, it’s premature to give the show an unqualified endorsement. But it does represent the kind of drama that should appeal to a sophisticated palate if the ongoing quality justifies first impressions.

The Slap is rare TV, depicting the kind of drama viewers might find themselves caught up in. It’s nice to see a show shamelessly go about doing its manipulative business.

A sophisticated, suspenseful comedy of ill manners that seems much more like a Showtime or Netflix drama than a broadcast network offering.

The Slap has the complexity and subtlety that's hard to find in a lot of broadcast network programming, and it's to NBC's credit that they're taking a chance with a limited-run series we'd expect to find on cable.

A momentary lapse could lead to weeks of thought-provoking drama. The Slap echoes.

The slight overdose of hideousness and the faintly mocking narration by Victor Garber combine to sabotage our investment. Yet Quinto is strong, and most of the characters pique curiosity, even as they grate.

The two episodes sent to critics aren’t perfect, but their flaws (pompous introductory narration, a weak performance by Thurman, a handful of telegraphed cliches in the plot) are easily overlooked. Other performances, especially those of Quinto and Sarsgaard, are stunning in this provocative and surprisingly literate character-driven drama.

The Slap, a provocative new NBC drama, is a saga that gets under your skin. That doesn't mean it's a great show, but I imagine the issues it raises will spark plenty of spirited dinner-table chatter among those who see it.

Different and complicated, The Slap feels like something viewers might flock to on cable or Netflix.

If ever a show was made for hate-viewing, it’s The Slap.... Where The Slap will be going in subsequent episodes is unclear and, mostly, irrelevant. Any and all misfortune, however, will be warmly welcomed.

It’s well-acted while at times also being mis-directed in terms of storytelling and too many hit-over-the-head characterizations.

There is enough going on in The Slap without the addition of the narration, which is reminiscent of the voice over on Pushing Daisies and sounds like it's describing a comedy. Get rid of that smug, knowing narrator, The Slap can speak for itself.

It's not fully good by any means, but I will watch more episodes, and I'm interested how everything will get resolved. I'm more curious about the characters of The Slap than I am about the characters of, say, The Affair.

No question, this is a high-quality production with a fine cast that includes Marin Ireland, Brian Cox, Thomas Sadoski, Michael Nouri, and Penn Badgley. But it's also terribly stagey and saddled with a pretentious voice-over by Victor Garber.

Even if the tale is not particularly captivating, the actors, in particular Sarsgaard and Newton, enliven the quotidian details.

The Slap just misses being as sharp in the execution as it is in the concept.

It's quite a cast and a good thing too, considering the almost uniformly absurd character types they miraculously manage to animate.

Add all this up, and what results is not an elegant, adult, psychologically astute miniseries. Instead, The Slap is a bulldozer: bluntly, gracelessly effective.

The cast is inviting.... But the too-prominent, overly obvious voice-over narrator is a truly awful innovation.

It is humorless, pretentious, a waste of a number of good performances, and about as subtle as its title action, but it is also very real.

Zachary Quinto, Peter Sarsgaard, Uma Thurman, Thandie Newton and Melissa George all try their best, but this is not a legal drama or a cop show, where a near-miss can more or less work. You either nail this kind of challenging material or you don't, and The Slap ultimately fails to live up to the potential implied in its attention-getting title.

The Slap has the ideas and the assembled talent to make a better, subtler character exploration, but it’s brought down by hamhanded characterization and an assemblage of bourgeois-Brooklyn types that it’s impossible (even for another bourgeois-Brooklyn type) to care about.

It's as if every line in the script was written in capital letters--with the exception of the even more ludicrous narration, which was no doubt printed in florid italics.

Meant to provoke, it's about as subtle as a slap.... It's also a "Saturday Night Live" parody waiting to happen.

Maybe in an airy Broadway theater the issues the show attempts to explore would play better, but on TV The Slap suffocates, packed with too many awful characters I don't want to spend another moment watching.

Everything about The Slap feels manipulated — you can smell the smoke off the puppet strings as the characters are jerked into being jerks. And that's just the pilot. The anvil drops more often and with more velocity in the second episode.