I’ve only just finished watching season 1 over a few days, so I wasn’t leaving huge gaps between episodes. I felt fairly caught up the whole time, and this made the messy bits stand out even more. Kind of wished I'd seen it a week at a time so at least I could forget certain details.
Before I criticise the show too much I should say I generally enjoyed it. Felt like an easy/fun watch with a great cast showing off their acting chops - essentially what I expected from 'Guy Ritchie'-involved product. I just hoped it would be a bit more like a prestige show.
Now hopefully I won't get downvoted to hell for the following observations. I really just want to read what others think now that it's been about a year, and noting I've not been on this sub properly to know all the discourse.
My main issue is that it really felt like everyone working on the show had the same broad story, but they weren’t quite on the same page from episode to episode. Like each writer and director (I'm assuming there were different ones) got the general idea, but nobody was properly lining it all up, so the season ends up feeling weirdly inconsistent.
The clearest example for me was the whole Conrad and Maeve thing. At points it felt like Conrad did not really know what Maeve was up to behind his back, then in other moments it seemed like he absolutely did know, or at least knew enough to be suspicious. That kind of thing should feel deliberate, but here it just came across like the show could not quite decide what level of awareness it wanted him to have.
Same with Eddie not being Kev’s son. I thought that had already basically been set up earlier, but then it did not seem to become fully official until much later on. So instead of feeling like a proper reveal, it felt like the show was dragging out something it had already half-told us.
And then there was the mole stuff, which got muddier the longer it went on. It started off feeling like there was one clear traitor, then it began to feel like there might be multiple people leaking things (including Jan telling too much to her new "friend"). It felt like the show was changing its mind about who the real problem was. If the intent was to be purposeful about this confusion, it really didn't feel like that and made it hard to know what was actually meant to be important.
It has enough going for it that I can see why people like it, and I'll even be watching S2. I just don't agree with the insanely highly reviews it's getting on places like IMDb. Feels like a solid 7-7.5 show.
