If you have time for 7 episodes of a weird look at religion, through story, you might like this one. The length allows for a full treatment of the backstories and setup for the end, more like a book, not some 90 minute movie that scratches the surface. It starts right out with a drunk who kills a young woman in a car accident and the paramedic makes a comment about God taking the young one, not the drunk.
It follows that guy, into AA, dealing with his religious parents, an ex-girlfriend, and other interesting characters, like the Muslim sheriff on the island of Christians. Sometimes a little slow, but playing full songs, instead of snippets in the background, is a nice change. Sometimes those are hymns, but the words are always advancing the story. The movie examines how people use scripture to make sense of the world. They are challenged on that, also refreshing, and not by simple flat anti-church characters, but well thought out counter-narratives.
Enjoyed it for the first 3-4 episodes. Then it started to go seriously off the rails in terms of quality.
So. Many. Monologues. And sophomoric, indulgent monologues at that. And the circumstances in which they’re delivered become increasingly improbable/silly. The monologues could have been half as long and still felt overwrought. Seriously damages the pacing of the show, and makes it unintentionally comical/risible at junctures.
Acting is all over the map. There are some powerhouse performances (particularly Linklater) and some really wooden ones to offset. The monologuing doesn’t help here.
Many, many incidences of characters acting flagrantly stupid or in inexplicable ways in order to further the plot. You can forgive some of this in the horror genre as it’s practically intrinsic but it gets out of hand as the show goes along.
Super inadvisable old age makeups that both spoil critical plot elements and also just look ridiculous. If you’re married to the notion of using old age makeups for this particular element of your story you’d better get them perfect, or near perfect. They did neither.
There were scattered bad actors but it’s funny you liked the first few episodes when there were long slow dialogs just for character building but then didn’t like the ones that had more depth to them. Seems your critique is more one of taste, not style