Bloodline

All happy families are similar, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. With this quote from Tolstoy it could be concluded, because nothing captures this "noir of family relationships" better than Anna Karenina 's introductory sentence. A series about how trifling disputes about silly things can irreconcilably tear family bonds for decades. A series on how these substitute disputes replace solutions to real problems that are being ignored and everyone pretends they don´t exist. A series about how we can make others believe in our version of events so that we can live with ourselves. It´s simply a series about a family you know/have. It takes time with the exposure and the characters. The style of the creators of the first series of Damages is clearly recognizable in this, not only by its structure and perhaps even by the superfluous allusions of events to come. We could praise the script, the charm of holiday free of the dark side of paradise on the Florida Keys, the characters and performances, but ... But it is not necessary. Everything is above standard, almost excellent. The driving force of the action are the characters. The characters are not only puppets in there story packed with twists, turns and cliffhangers. However, the building block of the series is worth pointing out, namely tension (and performances) between Ben Mendelsohn in the role of the black sheep of the family and Kyle Chandler as the "good guy" brother, whose actions are the embodiment of "the road to hell is paved with good intentions". On the contrary, Mendelsohn is a type of character that everyone knows well, because everyone has one in their surroundings. Someone you like to wake up with once in a while because he has great stories to tell and is never boring, but you would not want to live with him, because he simply attracts problems. He always gets into troubles and always know how to solve every problem. At least that´s what he thinks. And just how Mendelsohn coped with (more precisely he just drank and smoked heavily and was sad all the time) this "well-known to everyone role" is admirable. The above applies to the alone standing first season, as the second season is spare (unlike the final third). Which is paradoxical, because it's still eye-catching, albeit full of padding (actually everything except John's central story line). However, with regard to what the creators have to follow and what characters they have to do without, it´s not bad. Which, on the other hand, is not something insignificant, like this can be said about the lengthy patchwork, which it inevitably is. However, a nice one. That´s for sure. The third "I think... they´re all lying." season is completely free from any padding (except for the Ozzy story line) and it is very good, although from the final episodes you can tell that the creator originally wanted to make more series and only because they were stopped they ended the series hastily. To put an end to this after the trial, would be better than launching new story lines and try to deal with the outstanding case. It seems as if the creators only learned about the fact that this is the last season during the filming, because the structure of the first half is perfect. Only the last three episodes are "kind of weird" in many ways.". | S1: 4/5 | S2: 3/5 | S3: 4/5 | (20.02.2017) (weniger) (mehr)