Keith and I binged all 8 episodes of 56 Days on Prime Video over the weekend. I reviewed the series below.
56 Days: The Good
On the plus side, I found the storytelling in 56 Days gripping. We wanted to watch more episodes on Saturday, bedtime be damned, but enough episodes remained to convince our practical side to wait. The key driver of tension is not actually whodunnit so much as… who died? Sooo many red herrings, twists and reveals in that department.
The story follows the lives of both the suspects and the investigators. Not a single character in the story held the moral high ground. Everyone harbored major flaws. But some characters demonstrated outright malicious behavior.
Karma is a bitch, though.
56 Days: The Less Good
Now for the negatives. The story features a new relationship between Oliver and Ciara. That relationship ultimately results in a murder mystery. The two characters keep secrets from each other. One secretely planned the “relationship” in advance. But the characters legitimately fall in love.
Supposedly.
I didn’t see it, or at least, not enough. Eroticism – which seemed like a primary goal of the producers – pre-empted the emotional relationship and its development. The erotic scenes were just that – erotic – and did little to drive the plot or develop the characters or their relationship.
It’s also possible that the storytellers struggled to convey the relationship without sharing all the facts about the characters sooner. The show is a mystery first and foremost, so we were uninformed about certain things in the histories of these characters. Had I known the histories while watching the relationship blossom, I might have been more convinced.
Overall, I’d probably give the series a 7/10.
Literarily,
Michelle