pseawrig

Deep State kinda sorta wants to be Homeland, but imo it misses the mark. For instance, the writing is nowhere near as smart. Here's an example. Agents being hunted by American intelligence at one point fly from Beirut to France. Homeland would've mapped out some clever strategy for them to cross continents and slip through borders without being recognized. This show doesn't bother. The agents-on-the-run just show up in France like it's no big deal. Nobody has tracked them. Deep State is teeming with these kinds of cheats and plot holes.

Also, the production values in this show are fairly low for an international thriller. Iran is the setting for a good bit of the action across several episodes, but all we see of it is a single torn up street (over and over), an outdoor cafe, some parking lots, a very small hotel lobby, an office, an apartment, a patch of dirt, and an establishing shot of a power plant. Likewise, in America, we have two houses that are supposed to be two separate Virginia residences but are obviously the same paneling-filled house dressed only slightly differently.

As others have rightly noted, many of the American accents in this show are egregious. Couldn't the Brits have hired a few Americans for the bit parts? Or at least hired a few dialogue coaches? One of the British actors who plays a bad guy sounds like Foghorn Leghorn. It's ludicrous!

What isn't ludicrous is Mark Strong. He is phenomenal in this show and probably the only reason to watch Deep State. I watched the entire first season just for him, and it was worth it. He's such an amazing talent! He's not in season 2, so I'm going to skip it. Suspect I'm not the only one.

This series had a great premise, Berlin building back a de-Nazified police force just after WWII, when the city was split into four sectors. I was completely pulled in by its first two episodes. Then, the show began to decline, episode by episode, becoming ever less plausible and ever more hackneyed. It even got gross-out gory to the point where I alarmingly found myself feeling bad for the story's Nazi war criminals, who were being gruesomely tortured in long, drawn out sequences. By episode five, the plot stopped making much sense, every major character had become unappealing, the lead actor's affected New York accent was wearing thin, and I sadly found myself hate-watching the show just to see how it ended. And the ending turned out to be little more than a set up for season 2. Which never materialized. I think I know why.