White Lines

I really enjoyed this for a pandemic binge. You either love it or hate it. Great scenery and gripping story. Worth watching seasons and highly recommended.

The premise of the story is a good one, Sister heads to the white island of Ibiza as her brothers dead body has been discovered 20 years after he went missing. She heads out to try and find out what happened to him.

The locations for filming on the Isle and the beauty of Ibiza shines through on screen in most scenes and is a reason to continue watching.

But what is it, a murder mystery ??? Yeah in a sense, a voyage of self discovery, yeah its that as well, is it a comedy, well there is comedic scenes peppered throughout, Is it a drama about feuding families, tick, is it about the clubbing scene in Ibiza, tick that box, is it a parody, at times yes.

This is its problem it is all over the place following many different side plots and side themes. You barely get a feel for any of these ideas or stories as many never go deep enough.

The soundtrack is a mish mash of old and new but nothing fits into the period of music at the relevent times not that it's bad music but it never seems to feel right.

The acting is so so, some good some bad some awful, The only really charasmatic performance is for a character called Boxer who makes the show worth watching.

There is lots of nudity and sex of course being set in Ibiza but again it all comes across a little contrived.

If your looking for Nostalgia then it does not capture the time at all, most of it is set in the present day anyway with occasional flashbacks.

Overall it's not terrible but nothing special or great either. The main reason I continued to watch was the scenery and the character Boxer by the end I didn't care what the circumstances of her brother's death were.

Enjoyed the music, beautiful scenery and most of all, the character of Boxer. I like how everything was wrapped up neatly in the end.

I didn't really know what to expect from White Lines considering all the mixed reviews but the more I actually read some of the reviews the more I noticed all the low scores were from the same two type of people. The first are the people who rate everything a 1 or 2, click on their reviews and you'll see that 90% of their reviews are negative. Some say they only watched 10mins but based an entire series based off the first 10min of the first show! The others are bots from competing streaming services that rate everything Netflix does low regardless if it's good or bad. You can tell those by the things they say like "Netflix makes another terrible show," even though Netflix has had more Oscar, Golden Globe, Emmy, etc award nominations than any other company on the planet! I do have to say that the first episode wasn't that good and I almost gave up but I stuck with it and glad I did because it got a lot better!

On the whole this was an entertaining experience. It's well acted with interesting (if not sympathetic) characters, has beautiful sets and locations, and a good score. While this is a crime story it is not a "gritty" or film noir styled production. The who-dunnit story is the main thread through-out the series but often that takes a back seat to what I'd classify as family drama. It's almost soap-opera in some scenes. A lot of the show revolves around the evolving relationships between family members and friends as they deal with their actions in the current as well as come to terms their actions in the past. (The show runs in two timelines: the present and the late 90s). There is quite a lot of screen time devoted to family interactions some of which is quite dark. Other themes the show presents are dealing with the transition of youth to middle-age, sexual morality and parenting. If that's not enough there is drug-comedy and a little crime family conflict in there as well. If that seems like a lot, it is but there is around 10 hours of viewing. Some of the situations and characters are quite unbelievable, especially in the drug-comedy sections. All the Romanians in the show are essentially parodies which is at odds with the rest of the characters. There are a few very good performances in this show. Daniel Mays (Marcus) and Nuno Lopes (Boxer) were standouts to me but whole cast was good. The lead Laura Haddock was fine. There is quite a bit of nudity in this show. It didn't seem out of place to me but definitely something to keep in mind if you're looking for something to watch with your parents! (Actually there are a couple of reasons not to watch this with your parents but I won't spoil it further).