Divine: The Series (2011– )
9/10
Intriguing, visually rich, and innovative!
29 December 2011
I was a skeptic when I first discovered the premise of Divine -- during its Kickstarter fundraising campaign. It sounded like a pretty generic concept until I watched the fundraising video. By the end of the video, I was hooked.

Genre-wise, the series fits with other scifi and fantasy genre shows I enjoy, it interests me with the unique take on religion as preached and lived, and the acting is compelling and enjoyable.

It's a visually appealing series, to say the least. It reminds me of graphic novels, comic books, and video games, and I really hope they capitalize on this and expand the Divine franchise into these fields. I would love to play the Divine video game someday!

The episodes themselves have only a few weak points, and I think this is a result of only having six episodes out so far. Most North American shows have 22 episodes of ~40 minutes each to establish their characters, plot, background, and so on, so some of the characters can seem confusing or weird because you just don't know who they are and what their motivations are yet. A few rewatches of the episodes can help, and in the meantime, we'll just have to wait patiently for more episodes to find out the rest!

The bite-sized episodes aren't a limitation of the series; instead, I think they make it better, because the producers have had to compress character development and plot arcs into short episodes with no filler or pointless dialogue. Every line is potentially important. It also makes it easier to watch these episodes when you're on the go, because you don't have to dedicate an hour of your life to each episode!

Oh, and this web-series has closed captions or subtitles for each episode -- English, French, German, Italian, Persian, Russian, and Spanish are available for episode 1. That's very unusual for a web-series (unfortunately!), and I hope others take a lesson from this! It really opens up the series to international and hearing impaired audiences.

I'm always interested in projects that break the traditional funding model, and the community-backed support for Divine was inspiring to watch! I was fascinated by how readily people responded to this potential new model and hope other web-series can do the same in the future.

This is a web-series that I'd call very innovative in several ways, visually rich, and from the point of view of a writer, intriguing. Can't wait to see more!
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