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Critic Reviews
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The dialogue ripples with sly and subtle references to plays and immortal lines our young country bumpkin will create in future years. ... [Laurie] Davidson is magnetic. You watch this guy with near certainty that you’re watching a new star. But his is only one of several extraordinary performances.
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Sure, it’s fun to see Shakespeare get some; fortunately, Will manages to find depth beyond that.
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Entertaining newcomer full of energy, passion and baloney--the ideal summer diversion.
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Precious little, beyond his storied and enduring plays, is known about Shakespeare’s personal life or even his sexuality. So TNT is making him up as he goes along in a rousing, colorful drama that signifies more than nothing and indeed can often be quite something.
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Will is as sensual as it is suspenseful, as bawdy as it is bloody, as lusty as it it is lyrical.
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Ewen Bremner is deliciously, excessively vile as a sadist in service to the queen and, worse, a true believer. But the whole cast is, verily, first-rate and clever.
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Will is stimulating, refreshingly original entertainment, rowdy in its lurid re-creation of a riotous Elizabethan era where there is an insatiable appetite for what's new. [10-23 Jul 2017, p.12]
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Created by Craig Pearce, the series is brash and vibrant, driven by punk rock. It makes the Oscar-winning “Shakespeare in Love” look tame in comparison.
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Will uses this dense, bawdy backdrop to create a highly stylized world, as its namesake receives a sometimes-harsh education in life and love that will inevitably inform his genius. Or more simply, if you're in the market for a slightly different take on a historical costume drama, this TNT show just might be the thing.
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It’s also a lot of fun, lively and fast-paced, with comedy, tragedy, action and history, just as audiences of 1589, and today, demand.
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The theatrical shenanigans and poverty-level desperation gives Will a bawdy and often joyfully punkish sense of community.
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I would suspect that those more familiar with Shakespeare’s plays and the times may appreciate Will a bit more than others. Still, the series is hardly a stuffy costume drama. The mostly young cast is quite good, and there is plenty of sex, violence, comedy and intrigue to keep it amusing for non-Shakespeare fans.
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If you’re a theater lover who was hoping for an intelligent treatment of the great man’s formative years, it will all seem a bit silly. If you like overstuffed costume dramas with a veneer of literacy layered over debauchery, latch on.
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Will is fun, like a supercharged “Shakespeare in Love,” but the regalia, pacing, and dazzling colors often seem like compensations for a somewhat obvious and awkwardly expository script.
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Too often the show is raucous without reason, but Will sparks to life in a scene where Shakespeare engages in what in modern times could be compared to a rap battle or poetry slam, only in Will it’s a word competition using iambic pentameter.
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It’s not a dealbreaker of an idea to take a famous historical figure and put him or her into a world that makes his or her life more relatable to young folks who come along several centuries later. It works better, though, if the modern trappings flavor the historic character, rather than the other way around.
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Will starts to figure itself out as is goes along, paying less attention to the parts that seemed like bad ideas from the jump and focusing more tightly on the stuff that actually works. It’s a bit of a mess anyway, but I like that it exists.
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As long as Will is having lively fun with the absurdity of its premise, the show is entertainingly dumb, but by the third and fourth episodes sent to critics, that commitment has lapsed into something much blander.
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Will doesn’t seem that interested in Shakespeare as a playwright. And the resulting attempts to shoehorn him into other roles--sultry lover, newly minted celebrity, reluctant renegade--make for a frequently befuddling viewing experience. ... The odd thing is that when Will focuses on its hero’s artistic process, it’s not bad at all.
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It's a mixed bag--of melodrama and comedy, historicism and revisionism--that is always good to look at, if not always to watch.
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The result is a wildly anachronistic historical drama with tons of flair, albeit flair that is neither original nor meaningful. In its defense, however, it manages to be fun--eventually.
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The shifts from comedy to bloodletting can be unnerving, even if the whole thing is unconvincing.
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These opening episodes of Will heave with style at the expense of soul or substance. The real tension of the overall plot doesn’t kick in until the fourth episode, but before that the audience isn’t presented much to hang onto besides a surge of dirty, pretty visuals--and those baubles can only carry a story so far.
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Jul 10, 2017It’s called Will, and its focus lies in its shallow, dull, and unconvincing portrait of Shakespeare. What a waste.
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For all its frenetic pacing, Will seems wheezily old-fashioned, the umpteenth attempt to attract a young audience to great art by modernizing it--except that Will’s ideas of modernity are a half-century old.
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The problem with Will is not necessarily that it fictionalizes Shakespeare’s life, but that it does so in such a dull, haphazard way, with little connection to what makes Shakespeare’s work endure or what makes his time period fascinating.
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It's chaotic, sometimes almost incoherent. Wildly inconsistent, it veers from dark drama to lighthearted fun.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 15 out of 26
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Mixed: 2 out of 26
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Negative: 9 out of 26
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Sep 8, 2017
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Jul 11, 2017
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Jan 13, 2018