Wicked City

To judge by the first episode, Wicked City compensates for some pedestrian dialogue and only-on-TV coincidences with bouts of genuinely scary intensity, and doesn’t default to eruptions of gore.

I found little interesting in Wicked City until Erika Christensen became a part of it halfway through the pilot.

It’s still the usual story of women being victimized and mutilated. Wicked City otherwise is no great shakes in the script department, with Sisto’s Roth spitting out too many lines from a well-worn playbook.

In the absence of a believable or captivating story, Wicked tries to shock, but this is broadcast commercial TV. Ryan Murphy can and does more in two minutes on basic cable than Wicked­ can achieve in an hour.

Wicked City probably is a tired genre piece. (How's that for critical certitude?) But it's just possible that in future episodes, the flirtation between Kent and Betty may yield worthwhile television.

It’s not a terrible show for fans of crime dramas but it’s not great either, occupying the same mushy middle ground as summer’s “Aquarius” on NBC.

The cops, including Jeremy Sisto as a homicide veteran who loathes his new partner and cheats on his wife, are so generic they almost vanish in to the smog. [26 Oct - 8 Nov 2015, p.15]

This is a conventional crime show draped in period trappings when it should be steeped in the era.

Were the show conceived around Betty, making her the actor as opposed to a damaged innocent drawn into Kent’s web, the show would be a much more interesting show. As it is, Wicked City doesn’t have much to offer except for more gratuitous violence against women. But it’s got a great beat, and you can dance to it.

There are potential bright spots in how creator Steven Baigelman will handle the murderous partnership of Kent and Betty in the next nine episodes, but the show’s inept edginess and dull tone resoundingly guarantee that it won’t exactly be worthwhile.

Apart from some subtle work by Christensen, the series doesn't have much of interest to offer or fresh to say.

Betty may turn out to be the saving grace in a show that otherwise might fall victim to serial-killer fatigue.... But he real issue for this series is whether viewers will tolerate its tone. The premiere is drenched in an unpalatable sensationalism reminiscent of “Stalker,” the canceled CBS series from last season that was widely criticized for its voyeuristic, often misogynistic conceit. Fans of the early 1980s, if there are any, may like revisiting that era--the show, especially its soundtrack, never goes more than a few minutes without reminding you what the time period is.

Given that the show is trying sell the real or perceived glamour, sleaze, decadence, and danger of this moment in time, the overall lukewarm feeling of the look and dialogue is disappointing. It could be any old police procedural.

Westwick's sleazy preening is fun for a little while, and Farmiga's giving way more to her determined-reporter role than is written, but that does not an entire show make. The biggest sin here isn't blow-job murder. It's how boring that blow-job murder is.

Despite noticeable efforts to play Kent and Betty as wounded, troubled people with murderously kinky bedroom predilections, Westwick and Christensen’s stunted, one-note characters seem better suited as reenactments on an Investigation Discovery true-crime program than a prime-time series.

The most disturbing thing about Wicked City is that it's not unusual. It's not original. It's not particularly interesting. It's just the latest series driven by violence against women.

[The pilot] is equal parts unpleasant and uninteresting.

A trifling and thoroughly inert drama about a murderer who is called “a tragic soul” in the program’s press notes. There is something tragic about Wicked City, but it’s not the lead character.

The writing is cliched, the characters cartoonish and the action tedious, punctured by bloodshed.

Any series that calls itself Wicked City is pretty much asking for ridicule ("Sin City" already taken?), but to then go ahead and stuff the sausage with grade A baloney? That, my friends, is a demand.

There should be more mystery about what makes Betty and Kent tick, but we know too much from the get-go. The psychological transparency of these two destroys whatever potential the show’s concept may have.

The only thing challenging about Wicked City is the effort it takes to sit through it, and the only thing marginally fresh is its effort to up the perversion ante through a female accomplice who likes to squish spiders in her hands and rip the stitches out of old men.

By the end of the first episode, it's clear that the series is less wicked, than wearisome. Something lousy this way comes.

It's a profoundly unnecessary, formally cloddish collection of grating cop-show cliches, antiseptically scuzzy nihilism, and just stupid, stupid stupidity, wrapped in cheap, loud nostalgia for the L.A. of the hair-metal '80s. [30 Oct 2015, p.58]

Wicked City is both wan and distasteful, not as gruesome and blood-spattered as it could be, but thematically gross and tired nonetheless.

[A] sordid enterprise.

Wicked City feels especially egregious. It’s a desperate play to be a dark, adults-only story that comes off instead as purely childish. Wicked City is, in short, gross.

The tone-deaf play for major league issues in a drama is recognizable for the disaster it is within mere minutes.... You shouldn’t bother with any of it.