(:)(:)(:)(:)(:) 5 snouts up for HBO’s short one season series Run starring Merritt Wever (Nurse Jackie), Domhnall Gleason (Harry Potter Weaver family), Archie Panjabi (The Good Wife) and Phoebe Waller-Bridge (Flea-Bag), who is also an executive producer of the show.
Do you ever watch a show that everyone recommends to you only to be left cold? That happens to us fairly frequently. In fact, Right before we watched Run we watched Eastbound and Down also an HBO series. What a contrast. Eastbound and down stars its creator Danny McBride (Tropic Thunder) as washed up egomaniacal racist sexist baseball legend Kenny Powers. The other characters are only slightly less awful. A show needs to be tremendously well-written to compel me to watch awful people—Arrested Development perfected that model. Unfortunately Eastbound and Down does not. [Note: many many friends and critics have recommended Schitt’s Creek to us. We tried two episodes of that “awful character genre” comedy as well. It never grabbed us. Willing to try again if encouraged.]
In contrast, from the very first second of Run (which styles itself appropriately as a comedy thriller), we were riveted. You can instantly tell by the banter between the lead characters that this show was created by women. It’s a very sexy comedy, but entirely different things are sexy in a female centric universe. Talking is sexy. Kissing is sexy. Back rubs are sexy. Getting away from your children is sexy.
Inexplicably, this gem of a show, where every character, plot twist and sentence is gold, was not picked up for a second season while Eastbound and Down, a VERY male-centric show around a character only slightly less odious than the outgoing commander in chief, has run for four.
On the plus side, that makes entering into the series a very low risk proposition. Each episode is short and there are only 7 of them, so the whole season is about the length of a movie. Watch it.