Whether to stick around for that is a tougher call than you might expect, unfortunately. Despite its prestige home and stacked cast (Chloë Sevigny also turns up as a hard-edged local who’ll hopefully play a larger role as Bloodline unfurls, given the immediate intensity of her portrayal), Bloodline gets a little out of breath as it labors, especially in its premiere, to get us to care about the Rayburn clan. With their veneer of privilege and mostly detestable personalities, they’re a modern family of scumbags, and subsequent episodes will face the extremely easy task of getting us to hate people we didn’t like much in the first place.
What’s missing is any light to counteract all that creeping darkness. Like House of Cards, Bloodline is made up of characters who’ll do anything, including (it seems) kill, to feed their ambition, and they have the power to get away with just about anything. Even if any threats to their reign do appear, the Rayburns aren’t the kind of family to tangle with if you value your life. Danny seems to be increasingly in their crosshairs, and he’s their own flesh and blood.
The first three episodes also proceed at an agonizingly slow simmer, filled with ominous glances and testy conversations that suggest the series will take its time to get anywhere really interesting. Quiet shots of the ocean at night abound, and the show holds its secrets very close to the chest, only divulging little morsels every now and again. Such a format requires serious commitment, and that Bloodline hails from the creators of another show that delighted in screwing with viewers’ hearts and minds at every turn doesn’t bode very well.
More immediately, though, the characters are clichés (albeit well-played ones) from Chandler’s prodigal son to Butz’s agitator, which comes as a considerable disappointment given actors as tremendous as this. All of them do solid work, but only Cardellini and Mendelsohn establish a truly tense, dramatic rapport (one scene they have late in the third episode blows everything seen up until that point out of the water). The rest act their parts well without ever truly transfixing – perhaps later episodes can rectify this, but the amount of characters in the ensemble prevents any from getting a particular showcase. And good as they are, none of the performers are capable of spinning very ordinary scripts into gold.
All in all, Bloodline is a good drama that’s nowhere near as compelling as it should be. Its third episode is the best of the bunch, finally starting to move the story in an interesting direction, but there’s nothing about the show to identify it as Netflix’s next big series. Indeed, whether its laconic pace and dour tone will entirely turn off viewers remains to be seen, although the reasons for the streaming service’s attraction to Bloodline are clear, from its stellar cast to its highly dramatic premise (Netflix was clearly thinking Emmy at the outset).
Three episodes in, the series does start to get its claws into you. And once that happens, whether or not Bloodline turns out to be a good show or a mediocre one, a long night of binge-watching feels as inescapable as the brutal Florida sun.
Middling
With its dark ambience, stony performances and deliberate pace, Bloodline has a dastardly reticence to it that may turn off viewers. But once the series starts to get its claws into you, a long night of binge-watching seems inevitable.
Bloodline