- Network: Amazon Prime , Prime Video , Amazon Prime Video
- Series Premiere Date: Nov 3, 2015
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Critic Reviews
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For Fitzgerald fans, wannabe Fitzgerald fans, or even people who can appreciate a well-done period drama, Z has a lot to offer, even as it gives us lots to think about.
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Ricci, always playing a person rather than a personality, is the reason to watch. It’s a subtle evocation of a famously electrifying character, free from grand gestures, centered behind her eyes.
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Ricci serves as an executive producer and delivers the best work of her career. ... Z is helped by an unusual format--the drama unfolds in 10 half-hour episodes, making it especially binge-worthy. More providers should try half-hour dramas. They don’t feel like endurance challenges, as many one-hour shows do.
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Even though we know this is one love story that doesn’t end well, The Beginning of Everything delivers an entertaining seduction into a fabulous, bygone world.
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Z: The Beginning of Everything tries to capture the many facets of this complex and conflicted woman, and does so with some success. There are moments when it’s exhilarating to be immersed in the 1920s with Great Gatsby author F. Scott Fitzgerald (David Hoflin) and his wife/muse (a fierce, focused Christina Ricci).
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The show finds a nice groove about halfway through, after husband and wife settle in Roaring '20s Manhattan and proceed to tear the town apart.
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Zelda was a complicated woman, and Ricci definitely has the chops to play that. But the show never really lets her breathe into that realness, resulting in something resembling suffocation. The end result is that we now know what it’s like to party with Zelda and Scott. But we don’t really know who they were.
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While beautiful to look at--some of this was filmed in Wading River, near Herod Point--Zelda can also feel like that TV biopic we’ve all seen before: The one that trudges dutifully along without adding much depth or subtlety in the process.
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The story itself is interesting, if well-known, but the series is overacted, over-accented, and overwritten. [27 Jan 2017, p.55]
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Ultimately Z: The Beginning of Everything is low-fi, escapist television that houses a serviceable biography with a fair amount of style, even though] its TV series format feels a little like a missed opportunity to tell the story in a different way.
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Ricci is certainly convincing as a Southern Belle, and she helps make "Z" reasonably watchable. But when Scott grumbles in a later episode -- well before publishing "The Great Gatsy" -- "What if I never finish anything again?," there's a question whether, as a viewer, it's worth hanging around long enough to see him do it.
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While Ricci and Hoflin play well together, the intensity of that primal force, particularly from Scott’s side, doesn’t always come across. He needs a simmering intensity.
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The story lacks much in the way of momentum other than the downward spiral of too much booze, too little creation of art. Z: The Beginning of Everything is a spiffy soap opera, but not much more than that.
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The show’s repetitive storytelling would be less of a problem if it had more depth, but its characterizations rarely go beyond the rudimentary, and its dialogue is often clunky.
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There is exactly one sizzling moment in the 10 installments, and it has nothing to do with the couple’s supposedly fiery romance.
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Ricci plays defiance with a capital D. As Scott, David Hoflin is surprisingly flat, almost generic. Like too much of Z, the specifics of his personality have been ironed out, stripped of particularities, robbed of life.
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It’s possible that an acceptable performance could have patched over some of the cavernous inconsistencies in Zelda’s characterization, but Ricci’s performance is abominable.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 17 out of 27
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Mixed: 6 out of 27
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Negative: 4 out of 27
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Feb 6, 2017
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Feb 11, 2018
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Feb 1, 2017