Went into the finale so hoping for a change from the book's ending. Nope. Just as mediocre and uneventful as the book. Blah. What a waste.
Well, after finishing it is a very very mediocre show, full of cliches nothing original even the way he left and what happened. I really don't understand, was the book so good to make a TV show out of it ?
Only if you are a truly fan of Jennifer.
It was interesting in the beginning. But it kept teasing and teasing and nothing happened. The police keep arriving but they don't really do anything. Tension kept building up and then the show just sort of ended...
6/10 FAIR
Just watched episode 5 and it’s very slow….
In episode 1 we get to see the hotel scene of the step daughter disappearance from the hotel, we flash backwards to pick up where the story begins.
It take all the next episode until we get to the end of episode 5 to catch back up to that scene!!!!
Thing is nothing much has happened in that time….
This is one hell oh a slow show……
But with this all said, some how I do keep coming back and will see it to the end, this is how things unfold in real life, slowly……
While well acted and produced, it began failing by the beginning of the third episode. The motivations and actions of the main players became more and more muddled, leaving me very dissatisfied by the time he concluded. I'm tempted to read the book, because I can't believe the movie relayed the author's intent.
[tv+] A languid thriller that joins the list of "Apple tv+ productions with an attractive cast but hardly anyone watches". Based on a book too short to be adapted as a seven-episode story, it maintains the intrigue at the beginning, establishing well the distant relationship of stepmother and daughter that will evolve into a central theme, and tries to talk about chosen and non-chosen families, but without being able to focus at all. The slow pace and stretched plots do not help to build a less attractive story than it should have been.
Excellent show. Jennifer Garner can make one's emotions flip with the simple use of her expressions. No big speeches, no outrageous physicality, just the use of her very expressive face. That is talent!
You could tell the script relied heavily on a book...they spoke how book people speak.
"But I, ehm, just think, you know, that I should?" "I guess he just trusted me, I have no idea why"
What????
I assume, from watching the show, that Reese Witherspoon will be making a mediocre show out of every mediocre book she reads ...just because they feature women.
I don’t care.
It’s Sydney Bristow.
Review by Mike ShawVIP EP 2BlockedParent2023-06-17T08:10:43Z— updated 2023-06-19T19:42:28Z
An adaptation from a novel that actually feels like a novel, The Last Thing He Told Me is a slow burn. And while that usually pisses me off, I found myself sucked in by the story and engrossed by the characters. Except for Bailey. (She annoyed the crap out of me- though, to be fair, that was exactly the point. So kudos to Angourie Rice, I guess?) I thoroughly enjoyed the deliberate pacing and incremental unraveling of the mystery. Jennifer Garner's Hannah is pulling at threads in desperation, and her grounded performance is what makes the show work. Her moves from clue to clue never feel like they've been pulled out of thin air, or like Sherlock Holmes-ian strokes of genius; rather, she always looks like a normal person just trying to make sense of the tragedy and chaos that she's fallen into. I also appreciated the structure of embedded flashbacks. Sometimes they were there to provide story details for us, while at other times they served to illustrate what the characters were thinking. In just about every case, the context they provided felt earned and none of them were wasted.
When the show started to lose me, however, was when the mystery finally gets solved. The performances don't drop off - if anything they get more intense and affecting - but the motivations shift from "What the hell is happening?!" to "How do I deal with all of this emotional stuff?" It can make for great storytelling, but the slow pace starts to feel more like a liability after that shift happens. But by the time I was getting impatient I was closing in on the story's endgame, so it didn't detract too much from my enjoyment of the piece as a whole.
A final note about my overall rating. I had an average rating of "7" for all of the episodes (all "7s", save for a single "6" and one "8"), but I added an extra point for the consistency of quality. There wasn't a bad episode in the bunch, and I only felt the urge to skip through scenes a few times throughout. That's quite an accomplishment in this day and age.