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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
13
Mixed:
10
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews
Feb 27, 2017
Season 1 Review:
Though the star power doesn’t arrive until the last two episodes, it’s the first half of When We Rise that is riveting. The early years are passionate and filled with urgency, mirroring the excitement and promise of an era still basking in the glow of the optimistic ’60s.
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Feb 24, 2017
Season 1 Review:
[The first two installments] are Rise's best, most concise episodes, yet even they try to do too much, falling prey to an "and then this happened" narrative, a slew of distracting (and often badly bewigged) cameos and a rushed pace that is particularly ill-suited to the segment on the AIDS crisis.
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Feb 27, 2017
Season 1 Review:
It would have helped, perhaps, if the production wasn’t so drawn out, but rather condensed to a tightly assembled, one-night TV-movie. But at its best, When We Rise achieves the inspirational status it desires, and goes beyond that, to portray the romanticism of rebellion as an exhilarating, desirable goal.
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TV Guide MagazineFeb 24, 2017
Season 1 Review:
Rise is at its most striking as the real-life characters awaken to their sexuality and purpose, and crushingly sad when dramatizing the devastation of AIDS. [27 Feb - 5 Mar 2017, p.16]
IndieWireFeb 23, 2017
Season 1 Review:
The narrative strains to fit in dramatic moments, but time restrictions squeeze out poignancy and power. And every episode hews to the blunt screenwriting aesthetic that defines most broadcast fare: heavy on exposition, and willing to sacrifice confusing or ambiguous emotional moments for the sake of clarity.
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Feb 23, 2017
Season 1 Review:
There are attempts to humanize the LGBT story, to give the epic some intimacy and specificity by following three activists in San Francisco across the years--feminist Roma Guy, community organizer Ken Jones, and Cleve Jones, mentee of Harvey Milk and founder of the AIDS quilt. But those stories, like so much here, ultimately feel reductive and superficial, lost in the process of following every twist in the rights struggle, and making each twist comprehensible to unaware viewers.
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Feb 21, 2017
Season 1 Review:
The mere existence of When We Rise is almost virtue enough. But in terms of tone and execution, the four-part event series from ABC is wildly uneven, crossing from moving stories of romance under oppression to retellings of history that are so broadly pitched--and with such bad wigs!--that they’re too after-school special to be truly affecting.
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