Really was pretty OK to me. It was shot in such a way that I knew something was wrong from the beginning, so I spent most of the pilot expecting the light-hearted banter and seen-it-before situations to lead to one of the characters getting murdered or something. Then, when the pivot point finally happens (around where Luka Jones is pouring wine on his carpet because he's clearly way too drunk) I thought everything was suitably off the rails afterwards. I'd like to see more of this. Good cast, looked nice, felt modern.
The Cosmopolitans was weaker. It was very nicely shot, looked great (loved the stylized opening and closing credits), but I don't feel like it made good use of its time to say anything. I'm not someone who needs plot or even characterization, but I didn't get much thematically either. It was hard to say what the writer/director was trying to get at--was he saying something about Paris? About class? About quarter-life crises? There were occasional moments that felt like they verged on the author's experiences as a "Parisian"--the emphasis on the wine choosing at the cafe scene and then the close-up of the creme de cassis... and none of the characters really seemed to set themselves apart. The most interesting tease was Chloe Sevegny's character, who came off as enigmatic in an interesting way, but they spent so much of the time on the four males that I never got much of a hook to want to come back. I feel like they were aiming for something like Before Sunrise or Woody Allen or something, but I don't think they got there.
Hysteria was bad. First, I need to complain about one thing--are the budgets for these shows low as hell? I don't think there was a single B unit / establishing shot here that wasn't CG. It was awful looking. And then the shot of her with the dead CG tree? Ghastly. I rolled my eyes at the opening admonition that the show was based on real events. It isn't and it's embarrassing that there are people out there dumb enough to imagine that it would be. I did like the scene of the teen girls in the truck, which felt sort of true to life. But that's about all I could say positively. I hate the depiction of seizures on TV, they look so phony. Mena Suvari's damaged savant genius doctor character felt so stale. Another terrible shot was Mena Suvari, nude but covered up, sleeping on top of the blankets in a cheap hotel room. What the hell. From early on the lingering camera shots on anything with a screen make it clear that the central twist is going to be some Ring or Pulse thing about the perils of communication or whatever but when the big reveal finally happens at 48 minutes in, it's
embarrassing how badly it comes across. Again, the thematic elements were very half-baked. Okay, so the authors are very concerned about mass media coverage, the changing nature of communication, whatever. There's very little allegorical value here. Probably the only character that I thought really seemed at all interesting was the one of the two gay dads who was clearly a chronic Googler wannabe expert. But what is the show really saying? Meh.
Of the three, I think all three are probably salvageable (Hysteria only to the standard of TV horror, which is roundly terrible, but it's easy to imagine this being better than, say, The Following) but only Really actually hooked me.
What I thought about the last five Amazon pilots (I felt that all five of them could be made into workable shows)
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=100563851&postcount=307
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=100889342&postcount=313
I guess I'll watch the other two today or tomorrow and then rank all of the pilots so far. Thinking back, I'm surprised at how little I remember of that first original batch.
