The show started out strong with a few great initial episodes, but has gotten weaker once Zoe entered the scene.
Now I am watching a woman who apparently wants to learn finding the 'cracks' in people, however she can't just get into character after all these episodes and she just starts to annoy me. I never liked her as an actress before because I'm always seeing the actress and not the character she's portraying, and unfortunately the writing doesn't help her either.
Despite some good dialogue, I don't enjoy the constant flashbacks.
Jumping around in time with flashbacks can make it hard for a reader to get oriented and settle into one particular story, in a specific time frame. Here it's just used as a cheap trick to reveal why things are the way they are in present day, but I'm constantly thrown out of the current timeline. A story is most compelling when the main character has something significant at stake, and is engaged in a struggle whose outcome is still in question. Whenever you cut to something from a previous time period, you're essentially dramatizing something that is already OVER, meaning its outcome isn't a question anymore. And there isn't the same sense of stakes, because no matter how the flashback ends, we know the character is going to end up in the present day situation that we previously saw, with some new and present problem - which it usually would have been better to have just stayed with, and developed further, rather than bringing its dramatic momentum to a full stop with a flashback.
No matter how good the scenes from the past are, they tend to not have the same sense of emotional import. They tend to play more as information about how the character go to their current place. This can be important to do, and it's certainly better to see these things in dramatic scenes than hear them described in dialogue, but what's even better is to see dramatic scenes in the present, when the outcome is still unknown.
Now I am watching a woman who apparently wants to learn finding the 'cracks' in people, however she can't just get into character after all these episodes and she just starts to annoy me. I never liked her as an actress before because I'm always seeing the actress and not the character she's portraying, and unfortunately the writing doesn't help her either.
Despite some good dialogue, I don't enjoy the constant flashbacks.
Jumping around in time with flashbacks can make it hard for a reader to get oriented and settle into one particular story, in a specific time frame. Here it's just used as a cheap trick to reveal why things are the way they are in present day, but I'm constantly thrown out of the current timeline. A story is most compelling when the main character has something significant at stake, and is engaged in a struggle whose outcome is still in question. Whenever you cut to something from a previous time period, you're essentially dramatizing something that is already OVER, meaning its outcome isn't a question anymore. And there isn't the same sense of stakes, because no matter how the flashback ends, we know the character is going to end up in the present day situation that we previously saw, with some new and present problem - which it usually would have been better to have just stayed with, and developed further, rather than bringing its dramatic momentum to a full stop with a flashback.
No matter how good the scenes from the past are, they tend to not have the same sense of emotional import. They tend to play more as information about how the character go to their current place. This can be important to do, and it's certainly better to see these things in dramatic scenes than hear them described in dialogue, but what's even better is to see dramatic scenes in the present, when the outcome is still unknown.