Marco Polo (series): I fell asleep

in Netflix & Streaming2 years ago

The question I have for the community is this: Should I give it another try? Is it worth it or is it really this boring the whole way through?


image.png
src

The show starts out strong with a lot of action and interesting dialogue but then quickly took a downturn to a great deal of talking and no action and after the first 40 minutes (a whole episode) I fell asleep during the 2nd one. This is never a good sign when talking about a series because normally this means to me that the entire thing might fall into the usual dreaded "series that is being dragged on intentionally" type of thing.

The story is almost entirely a work of fiction as you would expect but it does have some historical relevance that I found out only by discussing it with friends and a couple of DDG searches. The timeline is there, but the rest of it seems to be pure speculation which I suppose could be expected from something that is meant to have happened over 800 years ago.


src

The production value is absolutely massive and probably cost a ton of money to make. This might be a big part of the reason why I haven't even heard of this before and it is nearly 8 years old.

According to various websites the series had generally favorable reviews but ultimately it didn't have a wide enough audience for them to continue past season 2. Even though Netflix is very secretive about their financials, it is rumored to have resulted in a near $200 million loss for the company.

Combining East and West cultures along with the might of the Mongol Empire seems like it would be extremely interesting but if something doesn't capture my attention even in the first 2 episodes it is normally a good sign that it isn't worth watching. One thing I did find interesting is that this was one of the last productions produced by Harvey Weinstein and well, we all know what happened with that guy.


image.png
src

The scenery, the settings, the costumes, the music.... all of this is really amazing and beautiful. One reviewer called is "beautiful but boring" and I think that even after just an episode and probably around 10 minutes of a second one, that I concur.

If there is someone out there that can give me some reason to continue down this path I'd love to hear what those reasons are but for now, I feel very little motivation to really even try to watch this anymore. I absolutely hate it when people make series that appear to be designed to just go on forever rather than just make a good story and present it at a good pace. There have been many series that have gone down this path and they all suck for the same reason. Just get on with it already!

I especially can't understand this intentional dragging out of the story when it is a Netflix exclusive. There are no commercials so there is literally no reason at all to drag things out. If this was on network television I guess I could at least somewhat understand why they drag it out but not on a subscription service like Netflix.

Anyway, if someone can tell me some sort of redeeming reason why I should continue with this please let me know, otherwise my overall opinion of this series is as follows.


image.png

Sort:  

I remember having started watching this series and given up on it, somewhere around the end of the second episode. "beautiful but boring" is certainly my feeling as well.

That being said, it might be a slow starter. It's curious that despit agreeing with the above statement, it is hard to exactly pinpoint what would have saved this series, since it's probably 1 or 2 missing ingredients which would have made it great.

great response. Exactly how I feel and i might just scan through a few more episodes in order to see the action sequences, because those have been pretty great.

I too got some bad reviews from friends so I didn't even touched it. After reading your review I realized why it's not worth it. I don't see if it's worth second chance.

Yeah, I went back and simply tried to get through one more episode. It's just too damn slow. No wonder they cancelled it after 2 seasons.

Coin Marketplace

STEEM 0.27
TRX 0.11
JST 0.031
BTC 68096.92
ETH 3795.66
USDT 1.00
SBD 3.59