Black Rabbit: The Good and the Bad

Black Rabbit -- all eight episodes -- debuted last week on Netflix.  My wife and I binged the short series the past few nights.  To paraphrase Charles Dickens, I thought watching Black Rabbit was the best of times and the worst of times on streaming viewing.  Well, not the worst -- I wouldn't say I'm hopping mad (sorry) about problems in the series -- but there were indeed some highs and lows.  I'm not talking about what lows just about all the characters experienced in the narrative, but how their story was presented to the us, the audience.

[Slightish spoilers ahead ... ]

Here's some of what I really liked:  The series had incredible soul, great acting, and great music.  About the music, I especially enjoyed hearing a bit of the theme song of MobLand on Black Rabbit -- I think "Starburster" by Fontaines D.C. is the best British hip-hop I've heard, and up there with the best hip-hop period.  The story takes place mostly in lower Manhattan, and the cinematography was real, bracing, and refreshing.  And the story was riveting, with big and bigger surprises throughout.

Here's what I didn't like:  The series was too obvious, even annoying, in the techniques it used to tell the story.  Lots of series these days jump back and forth in time without usually identifying the time.  Even if the date is identified, too much of that can be distracting (my wife feels even more strongly about that).  I guess flashbacks as an essential part of the story was put on the map in Lost.  But in that brilliant, pathbreaking series (until the atrocious finale), the flashbacks were elucidating and revelatory because they were clear, mostly because they were limited to flashbacks about a single character in a single episode.  In Black Rabbit, there were so many flashbacks involving so many characters weaving in and out of the story it sometimes felt like reading a book with some pages randomly torn out and pasted back in in different places.

Sometimes watching Black Rabbit almost felt like watching an entry in a some kind of director's competition for innovation in a movie.  One episode used the now common technique of titling segments with the name of the central characters.  This did give some minor characters more time on the screen, at the expense of the slowing down the action.

But Black Rabbit did get it all together in the last two episodes, with a heart in your throat ending, at once wrenching and beautiful.   All in all, very well worth watching, despite its frustrations.

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