This series looks fantastic, and a lot of care has been given to its production (including amazingly good English subtitles), but the performances are uniformly over-the-top: constant exaggerated drama; posing and other "attitude"; and stupid, clownish comedy -- everything, in fact, except believable stuff real people might say or do.
It's not a cultural thing, either, some sort of disconnect between Italy and the US. Some of the most compelling, moving, believable, genuinely funny and universally entertaining movies ever made have been made in Italy (everything Nanni Moretti has ever done, for only one example). It's just that the makers of this series evidently were going for a very broad, exaggerated, mawkish and slapstick kind of entertainment that completely turns me off. It's like a bad American sit com and a bad American soap opera all in one very irritating series.
G&T is so beautiful to LOOK at that I keep trying, but it's so agonizing to WATCH that I keep backing out. Too bad. A waste of money, effort, time and (I'm willing to assume) talent.
