It opens the front door to a house where a very toxic relationship is unfolding, then asks you to step in and sit for a while. I’ve seen five of those episodes, and though I’ll be discussing only the first two in this article, I’ll warn you that by episodes four and five, it’s easy to worry that the show is running out of story.Īnd yet at the same time, The Act’s languorous rhythms become a perverse attraction. The true-crime limited series, which is adapting Michelle Dean’s 2016 BuzzFeed article about the murder of Dee Dee Blanchard (Dean is co-creator with Channel Zero’s Nick Antosca), will unspool over eight episodes. While there are still plenty of shows that use all of their time well, in this wild new TV world they seem fewer and farther between.įor a while, I wondered if Hulu’s The Act was another series with too much time and not enough story to tell.

Throw a dart at your Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon home screen and you’ll find a series that ran for 10 episodes but should have only been six, or a series that ran for six episodes but should have been a two-hour movie. But a long-running TV show can almost feel like inviting a new friend into your life for a while, then watching as they grow and change.īut time has also become something of an enemy of TV in the streaming era. A movie is always finite, and you control how fast you read a novel. Its stories can unfold over years, in something approaching real time, and it effectively controls how you experience that passage of time, even if you’re marathoning an entire series over the course of a week or three. The chief storytelling advantage that TV has over most other narrative forms is time. The episodes of the week for March 17 through 23 are “La Maison du Bon Rêve” and “Teeth,” the first two episodes of Hulu’s The Act.

Every week, we pick a new episode of the week.

The act episode 1