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Critic Reviews
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Disturbing. Magnetic. Hold your breath. Watch.
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Those Who Kill can be a tough watch, because it has some intense scenes. Fortunately, they aren’t unduly extended, and for those who stick it out, there look to be rewards.
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Suffering is never easy to watch, and when a series revolves around a woman in near-constant mental anguish, things can creep close to tiresome. Such is Ms. Sevigny's performance, though--at once veiled and yet open to view as she has not often been in other roles—that you can't stop looking.
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What the 10-episode series lacks in originality it makes up for by piling on the creepy suspense.
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As has been the case in so many films and TV shows, Sevigny is the most compelling reason to watch Those Who Kill, but if the scripts remain as carefully crafted as that of Monday's pilot, Sevigny will have found a vehicle worthy of her singular skills.
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The pilot also contained a few eye-rolling scenes.... Still, Sevigny is quite good. Her character is complex, with a backstory, that we’re slowly finding out, for turning her into the kind of person she is. D’Arcy also holds his own.
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[Catherine Jensen is] a nicely complex TV character, especially on a show that otherwise plays like a soapier Silence of the Lambs. [7 Mar 2014, p.60]
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With so much serial killer programming on TV, like "Hannibal" and "The Following," Those Who Kill could carve out its own little place. But it's going to take some work. On the bright side, the show has Sevigny, who is the clear standout on the series.
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The drama really piles it on: Catherine's only hobbies seem to be cutting herself on her tummy and hips with a razor and collecting paintings of famous serial killers' childhood homes. Midway through, the pilot improves considerably--and gets even stranger.
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Laughably unoriginal, the greatest novelty of creator Glen Morgan's series is that his predictably troubled detective is a woman rather than the usual thirtysomething white dude with three-day stubble and a morning hankering for bourbon.
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As a psychological thriller, it's not terrible--certainly better than Fox's dreadful monotonous "The Following"--but Those Who Kill suffers from character/relationship incoherence.
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The show piles on plot and cliché. You know too much already. And yet, watching her, you realize you can never know enough.
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The premiere is as by-the-numbers as it gets in the already bloated genre of moody procedural, enlivened only by a viciously scary killer and, of course, Sevigny, who roils in significant silence even when she is forced to reveal that her character is a cutter.
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The world has so many series about dark humans doing dark things that it becomes all the more difficult to stand out, and Those Who Kill is so generic it doesn’t even seem interested in trying.
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Although Sevigny brings some of her flair for playing stubbornly outré characters to this role, Those Who Kill fails to distinguish itself from “Hannibal,” “The Following” and so much else in TV’s corpse-strewn imagination.
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The pilot of Those Who Kill features the kind of cinematic production values that we've come to expect from cable and the two leads are undeniably engaging, but the writing here is paper-thin, the kind of scripted crime drama that we've seen too many times for it to feel fresh again.
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Sevigny works hard at being complex, haunted, etc. while the show around her collapses into a voyeuristic mess with a denouement that makes one wonder how Catherine Jensen could possibly remain on the force beyond the opening episode.
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It’s histrionic and preposterous without being entertaining, and those qualities infect all the performances.
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With shows like Those Who Kill, the reward for watching serial killing is just more serial killing. That doesn't feel like much of a prize.
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Lacking the nutritious value of originality, we're left with Catherine's mantra about her prey: "You have to be worse than they are." It doesn't get much worse than Those Who Kill.
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The title notwithstanding, the show is mostly just guilty of a rather mundane form of petty theft--and a decided lack of imagination.
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Only trouble is--aside from the torture porn nature of the show--the story itself is a series of question marks that takes a plunge into the ridiculous in its climactic scene.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 28 out of 38
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Mixed: 3 out of 38
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Negative: 7 out of 38
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Mar 3, 2014
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Mar 9, 2014
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May 1, 2014