- Network: ABC
- Series Premiere Date: Oct 27, 2015
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Critic Reviews
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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.
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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.
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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.
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[The pilot] is equal parts unpleasant and uninteresting.
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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.
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The writing is cliched, the characters cartoonish and the action tedious, punctured by bloodshed.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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By the end of the first episode, it's clear that the series is less wicked, than wearisome. Something lousy this way comes.
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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]
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Wicked City is both wan and distasteful, not as gruesome and blood-spattered as it could be, but thematically gross and tired nonetheless.
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[A] sordid enterprise.
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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.
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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.
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It’s violent in a dumb, done-before, tediously psychosexual way.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 11 out of 33
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Mixed: 5 out of 33
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Negative: 17 out of 33
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Oct 29, 2015
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Nov 6, 2015
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Nov 2, 2015