Animal Kingdom

It's hard to put into words just how much I love Animal Kingdom. It's such an incredibly underrated show. It's about J Cody (who's mother died of a heroin overdose) and has to move to Southern California to live with his Uncles who are 3 troubled brothers and their crazy mother who make a living doing armed robbery's and other criminal activities. Jay doesn't really like them because they never talked to or helped his mom (their sister) and he blames the family of her overdose. He gains their respect over time and become one of the leaders of the family. This show will have your heart pounding from all the excitement throughout the entire series. Once you start watching you're going to want to binge it as fast as you can.

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 :)

This show starts out as a trashy, glossy, action-packed and very, very watchable entertainment. Successful bank heists are celebrated with a sky-dive, for no other reason than to have a very cool skydiving sequence set to pumping music.

The genius of this show is that it very, very gradually starts to deepen, uncovering layers to the main characters and slowly revealing their depths and complexities. It does this so gradually that you don't even realise it until realise you're watching some of the most beautifully-drawn characters on TV for a long time.

It then becomes as much a character- study, and a character-driven drama - as it is an action-packed heist show. The issues, plotlines and brilliant twists and turns are consistently unpredictable and original.

Some of the heists stretch credulity - as action sequences often do, but the whole thing is so skillfully-woven that it doesn't matter - you happily buy into the lack of believability in the heist/action sequences, because they're so well integrated into the brilliant character studies and first-class storytelling.

The casting is perfect - everyone is bringing their A-game but Shawn Hatosy is astonishing and Ellen Barkin is hitting a career best.

It's a Breaking Bad-level achievement, possibly exceeding it at times. One that flew under the radar.

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!?

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!