Still Star-Crossed premiere: A hodgepodge of maddening, magnificent

The Still Star-Crossed premiere on ABC has now come and gone, and the easy reaction to it is simple: “Well, what was that?”

There are many people out there in the TV critic community already ripping the show, one of the rare Shonda Rhimes series to not air on Thursday nights, an enormous misstep. In many ways, the show is a mess: The characters mostly blend together, the story is rushed, and the whole drama around Romeo and Juliet’s death is glossed over by some standards.

This is a show that, ultimately, tries so hard to be so many different things that it bottoms out at most of them. There’s not enough romance for it to be a love story, and not enough politics for it to be political. It makes you wonder precisely who it is for, especially since it makes you pay attention far more than any show should coming after The Bachelorette. It’s a show that should have so much passion, but doesn’t leave you feeling anything other than trying to remember who everyone is and what their relationship is to everyone else. There’s some assembly required here for people not familiar with the original.

Now that all of this is said … There is some merit to the idea of a “sequel” to Romeo & Juliet, and you can see that there is some potential here with the characters. The costumes and the visuals are magnificent, though someone should stop with the graphic jumps between locations. There is a show underneath all of this that could have been very good, had the writers opted to try to make this story a little more relatable. If they wanted to modernize the dialogue, they should have just modernized the entire show. If they wanted to go with the costumes, they were betting off staying more true to Shakespeare and its roots. The performances by the cast are good, but there’s never a whole lot of time for them to do anything amidst the music, the shouting, and the family feuds so vast that Steve Harvey couldn’t even fix them.

Still Star-Crossed is a mess of a show with some highlights hiding underneath, and its biggest flaws stem unfortunately from decisions that were made almost from the get-go. The pilot feels like one that was ordered just because of Rhimes’ name, and it should’ve been put back into the cycle for another year. With more developed, someone could have figured this out. Unfortunately, this feels a little more like a tragedy, and not the one that the Bard would’ve liked.

What did you think about the Still Star-Crossed premiere? Share in the comments below!

Meanwhile, head over here to read some more news regarding the future of the series on ABC. (Photo: ABC.)