Animal Kingdom

Joshua "J" Cody loses his mother to an overdose. He finds new shelter in his grandmother's pompous house, where he also meets his uncles. He quickly discovers that the Cody family finances their lifestyle through illegal activities - from this moment on, J's life changes suddenly.

For my part, I have to say "Animal Kingdom" is definitely a good and entertaining series that draws the viewer deep into the machinations of the Cody family, but the series also has its shortcomings.

The series starts relatively slowly - so slowly that at the beginning of the second season I actually considered whether I should drop the series because it had already been very long-winded up to that point, but I decided to finish at least the second season. I'm glad I did that because halfway through the second season the show finally picks up speed and as a viewer you become more tied to the series.

At the beginning the series also has an unusually large number of sex scenes, but this slowly decreases as the seasons progress.

I saw the series in German and unfortunately the dubbing isn't the best. Sometimes emotions are mostly lost in translation because something is not emphasized correctly according to the situation.

In my opinion, the series could have been significantly shorter, as there is a lot of unnecessary sub-plots or flashbacks, which makes the series relatively boring in some places.

The flashbacks are shown from season 4 onwards and give the viewer context to understand how the characters became the way they are. I learned to love the flashbacks towards the end, but when they were first shown at the beginning of season 4, I found them quite annoying because they took the momentum out of the story in the present.

But the flashbacks contribute a lot to my personal highlight of the series and those are its characters. I've rarely seen a series that wrote its characters as well as "Animal Kingdom." The characters actually all grow on you in some way and that's difficult to master when you consider that you have such a relatively large number of main characters here.

In summary, I say "Animal Kingdom" is far from a masterpiece, but a series that manages to perfectly combine crime and family drama and is clearly worth your time!

The show itself starts strong during the first 4 seasons. Unpredictable, raw, risky and includes great main characters. But who really steals the show are Smurf and Pope. Amazing from the beginning till the end.

My third favorite is J, who shows a great transformation during all the seasons. I'm not going to spoil anything but probably is the great acting surprise here.

On the other hand, the show is not perfect because of season 5. The worst one. Boring, slow and with no tension. You can skip and go from 4th to 6th.

Season 6, is an amazing trip to conclusion. It shows how Game of Thrones, Dexter new Blood should learn from here how to give viewers a real conclusion.

So, overall one of my favorite shows ever. A must.

I remember watching Fin Cole since his days on Peaky Blinders and while he physically looks the same, he certainly shows his skills throughout this show. It's hard to work out what he actually feels about his family but the hatred at times shines through, especially knowing they lived a mile away and didn't do anything to save his Mum. Smurf cast her out of the family and J has never forgotten that. As the show moves through the seasons and you become more involved in the show and characters, I found myself liking Pope more and more. At first he seemed really creepy, especially standing over J's girlfriend in the bedroom but the more you learn about Pope, the more you feel for him.

I REALLY like this show :)

OK so the movie was absolute class. Sheer genius in every sense. But the thing is it was never going to reach the mass market.

This show is both fun, dark and exiting. Yes the material is very similar to the original movie, but it's not trying to be something different. The masses won't watch the original movie because it's Australian and too heavy. Haters are gonna hate, but I would urge them to remember that very little material is original out there. Nowadays almost everything is an adaptation. This the perfect adaptation for the mass market who simply don't want to sit through one heavy, dark as hell feature, they want a recurring show, they want to get to know the characters. If this does its job properly it will have viewers turning to the feature film in between the first and second season...

As you can tell I loved this adaptation as much as i loved the original feature, almost more because it was fun. I want fun. I want well executed television and I felt that I was given just that.

I advise you try it out for yourself. You're either gonna switch off or turn back on so what's the worst that can happen!?

I saw a TikTok about this show a few months ago and I'm a huge Scott Speedman fan, so I thought I'd check it out. Well, I kind of didn't stop watching. I couldn't stop! The storylines are written so well, every single actor is incredible and it has a really good ending. Everyone I know are watching other shows and I've been telling everybody to watch THIS show b/c it will not disappoint. I'll probably re-watch the whole thing again because otherwise I can't get my Cody family shenanigans fix. Ha! J ended up being my favorite though. I loved the changes through everyone's characters though, too.