Bodies TV Review — Netflix packs four police dramas into one time-hopping series

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At the very least, you have to admire its efficiency. Netflix will reduce its production of single-view, disposable programming by combining at least four police dramas into one big, boring series to cut down on the massive amount of waste generated by its constantly cycling content machine. I have decided that.

bodyis an eight-part adaptation of Cy Spencer’s graphic novel that follows four different detectives in past, present, and future London as they investigate mysterious murders from their time period. The fact that each murder had the same MO (gunshot in the eye) and took place in the same Whitechapel alley is certainly a strange coincidence. It is somewhat difficult to conclude that the fact that each murder case involves the same victim is a coincidence.

This is where things should get interesting, but instead it gets boring. A show that chooses to juggle four parallel narratives must match its ambitions with intricate plotting and meticulous pacing. Here, however, there is little regard for order or structure, as the story erratically jumps from 2023 to 1890 and from 1941 to 2053 every few minutes.

A bigger problem than the disorienting, freewheeling chronology is that the tone shifts jarringly from scene to scene. body It’s like the Frankenstein monster of a TV movie, built from a variety of misplaced genre parts. A detective finds himself caught up in a strange period romance. The others are a blitz noir, a modern counter-terrorism thriller, and a dystopian sci-fi.

These elements struggle to make their own case, but the underlying conspiracies and temporal paradoxes that ultimately unite them are too contrived and complex to have much impact. you can’t. And this show is so bent on bending our minds that it ignores satisfying our intellects and stimulating our emotions.

Even the talented cast, led by Shira Haas (playing a futuristic police officer) and Stephen Graham (playing an elusive figure in a shadowy cult), is hampered by exposition and a script filled with clichés. There are limits to what you can do. body It lacks important, fleshed-out characters.

★★☆☆☆

Currently streaming on Netflix