This show drags on and on earnestly hoping to involve us in the internal turmoil of the characters when the husband/father disappears at the very first of the series. It wants to create suspense about why he disappeared or what the secrets of his life were, but it's just not very compelling.
Most audience members will probably consider some possibilities for what is going on by episode 3 that the script avoids until episode 5 or 6. The 7 episodes need to be cut to 2 or 3, which would be more appropriate for the actual amount of interesting material they have.
The writing is very one dimensional and of a quality you might expect from a Lifetime Original, Hallmark Channel or after school special. They find a couple traits for each character and hammer them into the ground. Hannah is strong willed, concerned for Bailey and confused; Bailey shows her unsettled teen confusion and rebellion by being petulant and rude; Owen is mysterious and concerned for his daughter. You'll get the tropes in one or two episodes and no characters get much deeper from there.
It doesn't help much that about half of each episode is told through excessive numbers of flashback scenes that drain momentum and spend long stretches tediously reinforcing whatever point the lead-in to the flashback scene was clearly going to make to start with. You will be bludgeoned with time-wasting flashbacks that you already know the point of before they've begun.
The writers also heavily overuse the trope of Bailey remembering one random detail after another when she's exposed to people and places she knew in her childhood at 2 or 3 years old. She's never sure of any of the memories right away, but they're predictably significant and the plot device gets reused over and over again as another example of the show's lazy and uninteresting writing as though the writers couldn't think of other ways to drop in more hints.
The actors try to make things interesting, but the script is so repetitive, bland, tedious and uninteresting that they just repeat the same expressions and emotions repeatedly and there isn't any real range of emotions. The characters also do some dumb things that I don't think most people of average intelligence would do in their situation and it makes them unbelievable and unrelatable. The last episode finally has some more interesting situations and choices for Hannah to make, but it's too little and too late to save the show.
I can't believe I wasted my time on seven episodes of this thoroughly mediocre show. The slight improvement in quality at the end of the series isn't enough to go through all the painful boredom of sitting through the first 5 episodes. I would've turned it off a lot earlier, but was watching with someone who seemed like they wanted to finish.
Most audience members will probably consider some possibilities for what is going on by episode 3 that the script avoids until episode 5 or 6. The 7 episodes need to be cut to 2 or 3, which would be more appropriate for the actual amount of interesting material they have.
The writing is very one dimensional and of a quality you might expect from a Lifetime Original, Hallmark Channel or after school special. They find a couple traits for each character and hammer them into the ground. Hannah is strong willed, concerned for Bailey and confused; Bailey shows her unsettled teen confusion and rebellion by being petulant and rude; Owen is mysterious and concerned for his daughter. You'll get the tropes in one or two episodes and no characters get much deeper from there.
It doesn't help much that about half of each episode is told through excessive numbers of flashback scenes that drain momentum and spend long stretches tediously reinforcing whatever point the lead-in to the flashback scene was clearly going to make to start with. You will be bludgeoned with time-wasting flashbacks that you already know the point of before they've begun.
The writers also heavily overuse the trope of Bailey remembering one random detail after another when she's exposed to people and places she knew in her childhood at 2 or 3 years old. She's never sure of any of the memories right away, but they're predictably significant and the plot device gets reused over and over again as another example of the show's lazy and uninteresting writing as though the writers couldn't think of other ways to drop in more hints.
The actors try to make things interesting, but the script is so repetitive, bland, tedious and uninteresting that they just repeat the same expressions and emotions repeatedly and there isn't any real range of emotions. The characters also do some dumb things that I don't think most people of average intelligence would do in their situation and it makes them unbelievable and unrelatable. The last episode finally has some more interesting situations and choices for Hannah to make, but it's too little and too late to save the show.
I can't believe I wasted my time on seven episodes of this thoroughly mediocre show. The slight improvement in quality at the end of the series isn't enough to go through all the painful boredom of sitting through the first 5 episodes. I would've turned it off a lot earlier, but was watching with someone who seemed like they wanted to finish.