1x01 Will

How did they get the likes of Julia Roberts and Sean Penn to sign on to this circus of the bizarre? Don't get me wrong, I think they both did as much as could be reasonably expected with what they were given…and still I don't know if it was exactly worth watching. How sad is that! To have that much firepower at your disposal but not even the first idea of how to tell a good story? Did Sean Penn really balloon out for this role? I spent the first twenty minutes arguing with myself if that was really him, and if that was all makeup and costuming then I need to go get my eyes checked. Maybe these really are the end times…

I mean when you get two heavyweights together on some project for Starz, of all places, neither of whom you hardly see anymore, with a story we've known all the nitty gritty of for fifty years, the implication is there's gonna be some secret sauce involved, right? Right?!? But if this is all that's left of two of the most mesmerizing actors of my youth, then I might need to rethink my whole second act in life. Maybe I'd be better off hustling three-card monte and living in a shack on a beach in Sri Lanka, or part of the janitorial staff at Robben Island; you know, somewhere I won't have the bandwidth to notice that Elton John's last three albums were shit or that Sean Penn is doing, well, whatever this is. A man needs to be able to count on some things! I definitely did not sign on for the world we've ended up with the last few years.

I'm gonna give them one more episode to make me a believer, or at least provide some evidence of a greater vision at work. I owe them that. If it's more of the same, though, then you might need to find an online translation engine for whatever it is they speak in Sri Lanka to read my future Trakt comments. Do they just call it Sri Lankan? I feel like if it had another name I would've heard of it, if only in passing.

Oh nevermind, it says right above this input box that it's English only here. Well, f*ck me running…