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75This series-in-a-series is an innovative and creative way to make TV, which I love. What would I have loved even more? A scripted series about a scary, charismatic cult leader.
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75A not-bad techno-thriller that could go interesting places.
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Feb 19, 201370It takes awhile to get into the investigation launched by Jeff and Skye. At the same time, the fictional "Cult" TV show seems more compelling than the real Cult TV show we're watching.
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67It's a great premise, but the show-within-the-show is so hammy, it's hard to imagine any viewer killing in its honor. [22 Feb 2013, p.70]
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67You get the feeling creator Rockne S. O'Bannon is building a puzzle box to nowhere here, but Knepper's malevolent glare sets a nice, unhinged tone, and there's certainly plenty of room to move forward.
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58It somehow manages to be more inviting than ABC's new and thoroughly preposterous Zero Hour, although both series could be the stuff of sadistic semester-ending writing essays.
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50Cult has just the right amount of preposterous dialogue and clunky transitions to draw potential hate-watchers too, a bit of zeitgeist juggling that is both slightly nauseating and admirable.
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50The occasional half-decent joke aside, the pilot episode of (the real) Cult is largely derivative, with a style and atmosphere reminiscent of better CW shows like “Supernatural” and “The Vampire Diaries,” and a mildly interesting, at best, metaphysical-mystery component that feels borrowed from “Lost.”
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50The opening episode is wildly uneven, at times downright irritating. But it's equally intriguing, compelling, and full of potential.
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50So although the details aren't quite right, the concept of Cult remains intriguing. Perhaps, like Mr. O'Bannon's "Farscape," Cult will improve over time.
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50Beyond the gimmick, will there be enough to maintain our interest? If not, Cult could easily wind up as one TV show in search of an audience.
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40Cult is too messy and unnecessarily complex to be the show it could and should be.
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40The show has got a ponderous B-movie quality, everything so serious and simultaneously so silly.
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40The shiny exterior and show-within-a-show construct can't obscure the pilot's general incoherence--or nagging questions about where any of this might be heading.
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37Knepper is wonderfully creepy. But that's the last of the good news. From Rockne S. O'Bannon, Cult is too complicated for its own good, and not satisfying enough to make it worth figuring out.
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30Watching Cult is like trying to read a Kafka novel in Sanskrit. When you’re blind. And drunk.
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25An ill-conceived, poorly scripted, woodenly acted mess, Cult is watchably crazy, but that's the highest praise I can give it.
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25This is not an easy show to watch, not because of its ambition, but because it’s just so pointlessly mysterious.
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20It's definitely too laughably convoluted to go into.
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20Some scenes play like those stiff “re-creations” in crime reality shows and the camera’s constant quick-cuts promote headaches, not intrigue.