Tim here. We've had a little more than a week now to play around with the new Netflix series Sense8, which has hopefully been enough time for everybody to process it. For myself, I'm still working on that: it's a whole lot of show, frequently not to its benefit. But it dreams no little dreams.
The show is the brainchild of J. Michael Straczynski, whose Babylon 5 largely created the "pre-planned serialized television" in the 1990s, and siblings Andy and Lana Wachowski, of The Matrix and its many attempted follow-ups, all of which have been met with widespread derision and a small but freakishly adoring cult. In the interest of full disclosure, I should confess that I'm part of that cult. I even really liked Jupiter Ascending. So feel free to not trust anything I have to say about anything ever again.
Straczynski's achingly earnest liberal humanism blends seamlessly into with the pie-eyed optimism and sincerity of the Wachowskis' post-Matrix work, especially the swooning globalist poetics of Cloud Atlas. The result is a show that wears its politics and its sentiment right out in the open, with actors navigating big mouthfuls of dialogue that sound like an op-ed first, a stoned philosophy student's stream-of-consciousness second, and things that human beings would ever say out loud to other human beings third (another legacy of Babylon 5. I'm not even entirely sure I mean that as a complaint. Artlessness born out of sincere passion is a very different thing than a simple lack of talent. It's charming, albeit in a shaggy way.
The optimism and humanism combine in a globalist fairy tale: eight people around the world are awakened as a "sensate cluster", able to sympathetically experience each other's emotions and physical realities. It's a blunt force metaphor for how We Are All Connected, even in our diversity. And this is a considerably diverse group: Nairobi bus driver Capheus (Aml Ameen); Seoul businesswoman Sun Bak (Doona Bae); San Francisco trans activist Nomi Marks (Jamie Clayton); Mumbai pharmacist Kala Dandekar (Tina Desai); London-based DJ Riley Blue (Tuppence Middleton), late of Reykjavik; Berlin safe cracker Wolfgang Bogdanow (Max Riemelt); Mexico city soap star and closted gay man Lito Rodriguez (Miguel Ángel Silvestre); and Chicago cop Will Gorski (Brian J. Smith). That's a mix of nationalities from four continents, with four different ethnicities, two queer characters, and nothing at all that connects them besides the fact that they're all freakishly gorgeous. Nathaniel touched on the show's rampant sex positivity and attendant hotness, but all eight are pure liquid sex even when they're fully clothed.
The show's overriding problem is one that comes all too easily in the Netflix model: the storytelling and pacing are disastrous. Or at least, spectacularly inelegant. There's nothing inherently wrong with forcing some discipline on TV writers: part of the gracefulness of Babylon 5 was a structure carefully designed to exploit the predetermined shape of regular TV seasons. The 12 episodes of Sense8's first season - it openly yearns for a second - have no regular shape at all, other than a tendency to end on the backside of a game-changing action setpiece. Viewed either as 12 individual pieces or one roughly 11-hour binge, the overall structure of the narrative is a big, ungainly lump.
As a whole, Sense8 is vaguely about a conspiracy to stop these eight from exploiting their new connection, but it has an awfully hard time building up to anything comprehensive. Instead, it consists of eight mostly disconnected individual narratives that start to bleed across as cast members pop in and out of each other's heads. In fairness, those individual narratives, each a genre riff parodying stereotypical national film styles, can be quite enjoyable. Lito's story turns into a wacky melodrama, Wolfgang's is a gritty crime thriller, Kala's is a trite romantic drama interrupted by musical numbers. It makes Sense8 a commentary on global film culture as much as on global society, and it means that it's never less than watchable, and frequently much more than that.
Indeed, the moment that just plain work are breathtaking. The end of episode 4, a giddy karaoke-inspired sing-a-long that finds the sensates sharing a moment of joy even as their various lives are in different states of stress, is the moment that the show's humanistic concept absolutely snapped into focus for me.
A similar clarity comes along during the action sequences that keep figuring out ways to switch characters into each others' bodies on the fly, enthralling moments based in character and anxious to completely dazzle us. This is when it's most obvious that yeah, the siblings who made The Matrix came up with the idea for this, even though they only directed three of the eight subplots (Cloud Atlas co-director Tom Tykwer, Wachowski mentee James McTeigue, and the siblings' VFX supervisor Dan Glass divided the other eight between them.
Then again, that focus doesn't arrive till the end of episode 4. Freed from any need to fit everything into a set space - Netflix gave the creators an extra two episodes when it became clear that they had too much material - Sense8 advances in a maddeningly indulgent way, in terms of character development even more than the way it slowly doles out plot details. As late as episode 8, it's still using a gag introduced early on which two characters don't realize that they've begun sharing consciousness. It's amusing and cute, but it starts to feel like flogging a dead horse long before the writers give up on it. Or there's the repetitive insistence on giving every character a fully-staged tragic backstory (frequently involving daddy issues, because that's not a trope that has been run into the ground or anything), with several of them all crammed into one long stretch of miserable flashbacks in a late episode. The show digs in hard to the defense that it's more interested in characters than its myth-arc, but that defense only goes so far when the characters themselves are handled in such a messy, unfocused way.
But I'm slagging on a show I actively enjoyed. It's hard to imagine a more generous, less cynical diagnosis of the problems of the modern interconnected world, or a television series whose writers so openly love all of their main characters and want them to be happy and fulfilled no matter who they are. It's stylish in a way that mixes tourism-board glossiness with a kind of naturalism (it's not an accident Tykwer's scenes are both the most visually hard and realistic, and also the series' best), and while much of it is eye candy, it's darn luxurious. No matter how pretty it is or how lovable the characters are, the show is definitely a slog in places, but its committed. This is clearly the result of authors falling too much in love with their material and characters to make hard choices of what not to include, and as hugely messy as that makes it, there's never a point where you can’t feel that love.
Overall season grade: B