godgirl

At times watching the episodes I was rolling around with laughter. I've given up watching the UK version as it's become somewhat stuffy and dated with team captains now into their dotage. The younger, fresher team captains and presenter, a great mix of guests and a far broader sense of humour without the endlessly now dated pedantry of Hislop and phoning it in occasional quip from Merton makes this one far fresher, funnier and more vibrant in character.

Truly a great reimagining of the UK show with broad appeal even to UK viewers who are in tune with US politics, cultural and social references.

You might not find it as funny if you're expecting it to be a facimile of the UK format, but you'll love it if you enjoy a show where women and minorities are not always the just the token guest or presenter as is the case with the UK show.

I used to love the UK show, don't get me wrong. But they self-censor themselves so much now due to Hislop's history of ending up in litigation that it's always "oh we can't say this" and Paul Merton barely says a word most weeks now.

The US one definitely feels like a breath of fresh air in comparison.

I was desperate to enjoy this, set in an unusual location and featuring some interesting characters and missing people... but to spend almost 8 hours watching it only for the end to be a total rushed mess was a disappointment.

Some characters are never even seen in photos making them hard to recall, yet at the end they seem to become incredibly relevant to the story which meanwhile spends ages introducing various locals and their relationships, and yet in the end, the central mystery somehow rushed and inexplicable.

The characters that ARE dramatically important are barely introduced or their relationship to the leads is unclear. A lot of head-scratching at the end of it for me.

I'd waited until the last episode dropped before watching them all back to back and avoided reading up on it in the meantime so tried to watch with fresh eyes, though I'd seen some of the pre-release PR for it including the trailers and characters revealed in advance by Disney/SW. It started very slowly and seemed somewhat confusing at first, then felt incredibly predictable at times, then suddenly twisted in odd ways from where I thought it was heading.

As other reviewers have mentioned, dialogue is a major let down in this series more than anything else I feel. Some of the back stories could have been fleshed out much better, relationships between some characters ought to have been given more depth and scope and indeed, their motivations and reasoning was often unclear and then even as one began to make sense of it, they shifted again. Promising characters weren't given the room to really breathe life into their parts, others were not even given any kind of personality. I've never seen so many Jedi ignore each other despite ostensibly being part of a team, so many illogical actions and unexplained decisions being made. Somehow what should have been a novel, nuanced and interesting story felt like it had either scripted or edited so poorly as to leave me wondering whose idea of good dialogue this was. Mother Aniseya and Mother Koril and their coven deserved much greater backstories and the dynamics within the Jedi and amongst the witches ought to have been explored more deeply and somehow Kelnacca's role and value confused me totally too. Did they make editing choices based on how many episodes they'd agreed to? It's not live TV, they could've added 10minutes to several episodes to flesh out more details of both the coven and the Jedi Order at the time as it seemed so many decisions and lynchpins of the plot made little sense in the way it was presented to us and ultimately I think that's what has ended up creating this "could've been a lot better" series from what might have been a very promising set of ideas.

Watch it with reservations, but ultimately considering the well relatively well developed script and plot arcs of The Bad Batch, for example, or the utterly unsurpassed emotional masterpiece that was Andor Season 1, The Acolyte has really failed to deliver what could've been a deeply compelling piece of new Star Wars lore.