david-2348

The actors were superb and the single-take camera work each episode was almost unbelievable. Unfortunately, the latter, while breath-taking in its technical brilliance, ruined what could have been a brilliant story. By definition, if you do an hour long episode as a single take, that episode can only cover one hour of real time. So we get 4 single hour slices that don't do the story justice. Aspects of the story just get dropped because if you are going to cover the family at home in an episode, you can't cover anything else. And so much time is wasted each hour solely due to the decision to film each episode in one take. When they drive to the hardware store it takes 8 minutes (13% of the entire episode, and that's just one way - they still have to drive home), so the trip gets filled with pointless dialogue. The same scene could have been made in half the time if they didn't need to stick to a single take.

In short, while mine is clearly a minority opinion, the director wanted to be very clever with the camerawork (and he was - definitely deserves an award for that), and that did make it feel very realistic, but it was at the expense of the story, which felt disjointed and half-baked.

I love westerns, and this had the potential to be a good one, but it was ultimately a complete mess due to extremely questionable editing, and trying to cover too much ground with too many characters in too little time. As others have said, this would have made a great mini-series, giving more time to develop the characters and storylines.

It was almost as if they were intentionally trying to be obtuse and confusing. Would it have hurt to put in some titles whenever the time and location changed? For example, knowing that it was now 18XX and we were in Texas, or wherever, would have helped immensely.

Technically, as a means of getting the story across in a coherent way that was enjoyable for the viewer I would probably only rate it 4/10, but there were individual storylines that were enjoyable to watch - hence my higher overall rating. But man, what a missed opportunity to make something really good.

I like intelligent dramas (the stuff the Brits are good at), and my wife likes wholesome romcoms. I put up with this show so we can watch something together, and for several seasons it was fairly painless viewing, even though some of the characters were extremely annoying. It has never been an intelligent drama, but now it is almost the polar opposite of intelligent. Erin Krakow has the acting depth and breadth of a puddle. How on earth did she ever become one of Hallmark's top actors? The half-open mouth, half-smiley look that she manages to pull off 20 times an episode is painful to watch. When it comes to wooden actors, she leads the pack. Rosemary and Bill try to inject some zing into the show, but it's pretty much on life support at the moment (season 11). Maybe the producer's plan is to keep the Elizabeth-Nathan-Lucas love triangle going forever, and just change the main love interest from season to season. They could just reuse the earlier scripts. Oh wait, that is pretty much what they are doing this season. I love my wife, so I will keep watching it with her, but she will probably need to wake me as the credits roll.