I had 40 minutes to spare and Between popped up on Netflix so I thought to myself "exactly how bad can it be?" The answer is pretty fucking bad, it is the worst Netflix "original" (I realise that it technically is a co-production) by quite a bit. Since there isn't an OT (thank Cthulu) I'll drop my thoughts here. The following contains spoilers in case you want to avoid those, but I would suggest avoiding the show rather than the spoilers.
It took the show about 4 seconds to get on my bad side, adding shitty sound effects of someone typing to that text blurb which indicates location, date and death toll just makes me wonder who the wanker is typing the info. Oh, and halfway through when you add the bleeps for when the death toll rising it makes me wish that your sound guy was in the show and older than 22. Anyway the show opens a few days into the outbreak with some guy with a beanie attempting to escape the quarantine, but he fails. That was worth showing.
A short credit sequence later and we're now on the day of the outbreak, in a high school with a pregnant girl eating a burger. The guy (sans beanie, with ugly hair) from the intro joins her and they engage in totally authentic high school banter with the girl trying to channel the film Juno, oh and they mention that bad ugly hair got accepted to MIT early. Cut to some young douche driving a fancy sports car while listening to radical dubstep. Cut to two dudes trying to fix their shitty truck so they can get to school, one of them just wants to get there so he can sell drugs for the party that night. Young douche tries to overtake another vehicle and hits the two dudes' truck, nearly hitting them. I smell a set up for some class warfare, but we have no time to actually stay with a character, fleshing them out or giving a reason to care about them. Cut to the least convincing prison kitchen put on TV and two inmates picking a fight for some reason when one of them walks past the other with onions, (racial tensions between latinos and whites? Hatred of onions? idk show doesn't explain). It gets called off by two really scary and intimidating guards, one tiny girl and one really overweight dude. Cut to an army recruitment centre where a guy walks out just having joined up, he meets his young daughter/sister (one of the two, I can't be arsed to look it up) who reads of cue cards is adorably mature for her age and lightly berates him for joining up. And now we're back in the school with ugly hair dude, his teacher gives him some book related her masters'. The show makes it really clear that the teacher won't die just yet; "How old are you? Since you started your masters', I mean... Some kids say that you're only 22." "Actually I'm still 21". Mmm, that organic dialogue. They also mention that ugly hair got into MIT again, so that we know that he is smart and not just a blob of bad hair.
And that is the first five minutes; I'm not going to bother recapping the following 40 minutes in detail, because that would be putting more effort into this post than anyone put into the show. But soon people start dying by having red nail polish drip out of their mouths, mostly when it is convenient for the drama (talking about leaving town with your mother? Uh uh, she's dead now). The show is a mess, and unfortunately not a very fun one at that. The rest of the episode includes things like:
-Ugly hair hacks into some database (accepted to MIT bitches!), discovers that the youngest victim so far is 22 and leaps to makes the perfectly logical conclusion that everyone over 22 is dying of this outbreak, also finds an escape route (which we know will fail)
-Druggy poor guy skipped town to buy some guns, gets stopped at quarantine when he tries to re-enter. But they let him through and gives him his guns back "Here you'll need these". Nice work protecting people there military guy.
-Not-Juno goes into labour on the same night that she was going to escape the quarantine with ugly hair (because of course she would do that).
-The fat prison guard gets tired of his work, leaves, but not before he lets the latino inmate free to kill that other dude. As you do.
-Just as latino inmate is about to shoot white inmate with a gun he found, girl guard tells him to drop it. He does so, and then she shoots and kills him.
-The two poor dudes, now reunited (thanks military guy), decide that there are no more rules so they steal a truck. Which conveniently belongs to the dad of the young douche from earlier. Douche+dad tracks them down, points guns at them, makes them strip and are about to cover them with driveway sealer, when wholesome army guy shows up and saves the day.
I'm not sure if I can accurately convey how messy the show is, it completely lacks an overarching narrative and is just a bunch of unrelated stuff happening. It doesn't help that none of the characters are particularly interesting, the dialogue is awful, and the acting is baaaaaaad (especially the young girl with the army dude). Some of the actors also look way older than the characters they play.
Join me next time when I'll be hatewatching SENS8, because I'm not going to watch another fucking second of Between.