Truth Be Told

Season 1 is decent enough. Season 2 goes off the rails. Octavia Spencer and Kate Hudson have zero chemistry and the story sucks.

It starts really big.. Scenario is initially very engaging, you want to binge it..

But after 3rd - 4th episode, it starts to introduce all the cliches that were ever produced on TV.

Also, I am not sure if law works that way. A podcast producer playing with incriminating evidence and acting as a one woman police force? People getting into prison with testimonies etc?

These facts damage the plausibility of the series. The writer of the work that the series is based on is a lawyer, I can understand playing with itsy bitsy legal details for the sake of story telling but all in all, the method damages the quality.

Plot is good, scripts are not. Great cast squandered.

Thought it was passable to start. I just find myself being less and less engaged each episode. It's getting more and more ridiculous as it goes on, and not in an entertaining way.

The idea of the show is not bad but the writing is just not good! The characters are all unlikable and there's no flow to the show. I'm not a fan of Octavia Spencer but I actually don't think it's her fault. The characters are written in a way that makes them look weak. One minute they have faith and care all about truth and justice and then all of a sudden they couldn't care less. In one scene they talk about how it's impossible to find a certain witness and in the next scene they're talking to that exact witness (just out of the blue). Not to mention that people seem to remember things that happened twenty years ago like it was yesterday. It's not believable.

Another thing that really bother me, is that the main character starts the show worrying her actions may have contributed to the destruction of a young man's life but to get him out of it she has no problem ruining other people's lives on the most faint evidences (if you can even call it that) or stupid speculations.

The acting is mostly ok (although not always) but it feels like they are trying way to hard to sell it. There were scenes that should have made me cry but I felt nothing. It felt forced. It just didn't have a true feel to it and by the end of the season we are left with plenty of unanswered questions. There's "closure" (or something of a sort), we learned what really happened but it doesn't make a lot of sense and if you really think about it, there's just a lot that doesn't add up. Also, the dialogue is not good. I found myself wondering many times "who would say that" or "who talks like that".

Can't recommend it, sorry.

This is an interesting take on a current phenomenon, the crime podcast. Poppy Parnell (Academy Award Winner Octavia Spencer) is an investigative crime reporter turned podcaster. So the premise of the series is untangling a mystery per season. The cast and performances are solid. The tone and music are evocative. My biggest problem was with how the series is held hostage to its premise. Because each episode contains portions of a podcast, the pace is dampened by heavy handed moralizations and narrative. The first season's mystery was compelling enough to compensate for it (I consistently rated those episodes 8/great) but, despite the addition of Kate Hudson to the second season, the podcast narrative ground the series to a slow crawl. Overall, I give this series only a 7 (okay) out of 10. {Mystery Drama}