When We Rise

Quality performances and tender direction save When We Rise from perhaps its most glaring executional weakness, explain-y dialogue that’s beholden to teaching history and expressing policy debates.

When We Rise doesn’t pick up a story at its beginning and doesn’t leave a story with an ending. What it delivers is a game-changing saga from the middle.

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.

It’s as lively as it is poignant, and at its best when it’s demonstrating how the personal and the political can overlap, and how they can come into conflict.

[A] sprawling narrative that loses urgency the longer it goes on, but not relevance.

[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.

A sprawling look at the gay liberation movement in the U.S. during the past five decades, spread over eight hours, featuring an abundance of talent, occasionally too earnest, at times heartbreaking, and pretty much always eminently watchable.

The series wants to cover a lot of ground, and its fascinating most of all when it leads with history.

Its performances are strong across the board but its writing pushes toward the sort of obviousness familiar from past eras of TV.

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.

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]

Important television, but also wildly, maddeningly uneven TV, too.

The series’ latter section grows darker and gets rushed, losing any nuance or idiosyncrasy in exposition-heavy dialogue. It’s stronger when it filters history through personal stories.

Fueled by these performances, it frequently and undeniably rises to great heights. But add up everything that When We Rise has going for it, which is considerable, and, well, the whole is somewhat less than the sum of its parts.

The drama grows more plainly mature in the last few volumes, but the sheer amount of what Lance Black and the creative team are biting off here ends up limiting just how knowledgeable, sincere, and convincing the series comes off as.

The miniseries reaches for the sweep and heft of a theatrical effort, although an excess of earnestness prevents it from fully taking off.

When We Rise feels a little rote and predictable in its main characters’ trajectories but given its subject matter and airing on a broadcast network, that also works to the program’s benefit.

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.

As vital as it is, political strategizing just isn’t that engaging to watch.

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.

As a tool for outreach, the show is admirable, but as drama, it falls short of its ambitions.

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.