How to Get Away with Murder: It’s All My Fault

Big bunch of dumb psychos on ABC’s “How to Get Away With Murder.”

Well, we threatened through most of the back half of the season to drop this show from our roster after season one wraps and we’re here to make good on our promise. But lest you think this is going to be some diatribe against the supposed low quality of the show, let’s be clear, we’re here to praise How to Get Away with Murder, not to bury it.

Well. We’re here to do both actually. But mostly to bury it, it’s true.

Look, it’s a damn silly show and there’s not a thing wrong with that. We’ve always loved a well plotted soapy kind of story with all sorts of twists and turns and we’re certainly not averse to watching a little mindless television now and then. But we were pretty close to hitting the wall several episodes back on this show and we were saved only by a brief respite in which Cicely Tyson and Viola Davis gave a short Master Class in acting. But this week we’re right back to what has become the show’s signature: insane plotting and rapid character turns, the likes of which one never encounters in life. And we find that we’re just not feeling it anymore. We watched twitter get all explosive over the events of this finale and nothing raised the slightest shrug from either of us; not the HIV reveal, not Rebecca’s dead body, and not even the news that Frank killed Lila. It’s all so ludicrous that we can’t work up one true feeling over any of it. We just don’t care.

Once they took Rebecca hostage, there was nowhere for the show to go. It was inevitable that she wind up the season dead, just as it was inevitably going to be revealed that Lila’s killer was neither Rebecca or Sam. Neither of these twists surprised us, but what’s worse is that neither of them raised the slightest emotional response in us. We’ve said it before: EVERYONE on this show is an absolutely terrible person with the worst sort of morals. Every single one of the main characters. Now, to some, that makes for a deliciously devious tale of endless backstabbing and plotting. But for us, it just meant we kept waiting for someone to douse them all in gasoline and flick a lit cigarette at them. And we don’t have an issue with morally compromised characters and wanting to root for them, but there’s something really silly about an entire house full of sociopaths who all happened to find each other and keep winding up with dead bodies at their feet. In other words, it’s fine that they’re all so horrible, but so few of them are even interesting. They’re not devious masterminds; just a bunch of whiny and self-absorbed psychos. Except for Annalise, and that’s entirely down to Viola Davis’s Emmy-winning performance – and even then, she’s still a psycho and self-absorbed, but at least she can make the material work for her. Except this ridiculous sub-plot about Nate, which reached almost comical proportions this week.

Nope, we’re done. Sorry, for being so brief with this one, but we find we have so little to say, which is exactly why we’re walking away from this one.We think anyone who’s enjoying this show for the silly fun it is should continue to do so, but it’s just not working for us. Enjoy season two, guys. We have a feeling we’re going to enjoy reading about it more than we would watching it or writing about it.

[Photo Credit: Mitchell Haaseth, ABC]

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