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Tried to watch THEM. Couldn& #39;t get through even one episode of it. I don& #39;t know if the problem is necessarily that its "torture porn" because you can make stuff like that thats still decent. But the way it goes about it is just...awful, hack shit.
Like the family in it, I can& #39;t even remember any of their names and couldn& #39;t tell you a thing about them because they don& #39;t have character traits, outside of their victimization and thats just :/
Even in B movie slashers and lifetime original thrillers you learn about the characters and they have personalities beyond their narrative utility. that doesn& #39;t happen here. Everyone is flat and boring or, in the case of the villains, cartoonishly evil.
The racist white people who attack them act like cartoon villains, which I don& #39;t really mind bc like who cares, but they also get more screen time of them acting like normal people than the family the audience is supposed to be empathizing with? like what the fuck???
Good horror and hard luck tales should be focused on empathizing with the characters who are being hurt, how are you supposed to empathize with characters that don& #39;t give me any reason to care about them beyond the fact that we all think racism is bad. It& #39;s lazy writing.
You could definitely contrast this with the Handmaids Tale, wherein June is under assault by a fascist theocracy and forced into sexual servitude. June is also funny and smart and she has a family & a daughter that motivates her to keep going, even as she suffers terribly.
It& #39;s so weird, because you would expect something better when it has this level of production quality and this many talented actors (everyone is too good to be here) but the writing and direction is just so god awful it undercuts everything else.
Anyways thats my little new york times write up on the first *checks notes* 40 minutes of "THEM." maybe it got better after that and I& #39;m totally off base but I& #39;m thoroughly unimpressed by what I saw so far 
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