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83Tell Me is an incisive drama, but it's not an easy commitment.
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80Although it manages to be suspenseful about the journey of its jumbled characters, it is an unrelenting examination of the search for the hidden recipe of me, you and us that makes for a strong marriage, and that's something you ultimately have to steel yourself for in a weekly series.
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80[A] deeply interesting, occasionally riveting show.
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80Tell Me You Love Me is an engrossing, searing, sometimes squirm-inducing study of intimacy, told with a fly-on-the-bedroom-wall realism that is both clinical and wrenching. Voyeurism has rarely felt so unnerving yet ultimately rewarding.
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80Tell Me You Love Me is not only more provocative than any of the broadcast networks' new fall shows, but also more sophisticated--even than those shows that aspire to be "adult."
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80It's imperative to make [a commitment] to this series because it doesn't really find itself until the second and third episodes. That's when you feel and recognize the beauty and the pain that Cynthia Mort smartly and sensitively portrays in her fiercely honest examination of sex in relationships.
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80By the end of the first hour of Tell Me, I found myself caring deeply about what was happening to the couples and whether, in the end, they would find some joy of sex and emotional satisfaction. And whether I care about the characters is always my bottom line as to whether a series succeeds.
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75The rest of the drama, though, suspends disbelief much more successfully. The acting, by both men and women, is quite nuanced and well-observed. After a few episodes, you feel their pain, and hope that it is eased.
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70The series is bold in its candor and unhurried attention to detail, but not quite brave enough to lay bare the bleakest, pettiest injuries that can scar a marriage.
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70In essence, you're watching the parts of life we're never supposed to see play out before our eyes, and the effect can be either uncomfortable but fascinating or whiny and dull.
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70It's daring, disconcerting and/or enlightening.
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70Once you get past the sex and if you can endure the sadness of the stories, Tell Me begins to have an addictive quality.
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63The storylines are not so much entertainingly paced as they are merely interesting, representational or too often plodding.
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63The stories and performances vary in interest, and all would benefit from a bit more humor. Still, even the weaker stories eventually pull you in, if only because you spend so much time listening to these people complain, you want to see how they work things out.
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60In short, if you come for the sex, you'll only stay for the characters, and those represent an intriguing but decidedly mixed bag.
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60The couples are ordinary, and so are their issues. That's part of the goal of the show--to dissect the mundanity of love and anger. But making a developing story out of these tangles and skirmishes is extremely difficult, and Tell Me You Love Me doesn't quite pull it off.
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50Intriguing--but not especially enjoyable.
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50Tell Me You Love Me begins within confines, its white, middle class, straight couples all dealing with versions of the same problem. That this focus might be "real" is not the question. More troubling, for a series banking on its newness, is that the focus is so familiar.
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40Unfortunately, it is difficult to stay interested in what happens to any of these characters because most of them are so absurdly unlikable.
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30There's no intrigue, no entertainment, and the show's motion, when there is any, is so s-l-o-w, it's virtually undetectable.
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30Why didn't HBO just go ahead and cut each episode of the hour-long Tell Me You Love Me to 50 minutes? The trims would have gone some way toward relieving the boredom inspired by the show's inchworm pace, and the shrink's-hour format would have made an exact fit for the spirit of the exercise.
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It's not the realism that brings Tell Me You Love Me down, it's the long list of unlikeable characters.
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20Nonorganic dialogue quickly becomes boring for viewers. The directors seem to have lavished so much energy on the choreography of the sex scenes that they have nothing left for verbal expression.
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20Yes, [the sex is] all very realistic, but not very hot, thanks to the fact that these are grouchy, humorless people whom we'd rather see hitting each other in the head with two-by-fours.
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20Tell Me You Love Me is little more than an intellectually pretentious, emotionally vapid snoozer.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 15 out of 29
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Mixed: 2 out of 29
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Negative: 12 out of 29
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10
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JoshlynH.2
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Cesar0