Reviews For The New Netflix Show 'Ratched' Are Bad. Here Are The Funniest, Harshest Things Critics Have Said
THE RATCHED OF THE EARTH
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Ryan Murphy's new Netflix show "Ratched," a psychological thriller series that serves as an origin story for the villainous character Nurse Ratched in the 1975 movie "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," seems to be a hot mess, according to reviews. Here are some of the most scathing or incisive comments from critics.

  • "[I]n both the book and film, Nurse Ratched is so deliberately unknowable — less a person than a symbol of how society grinds individuals down in the name of conformity at all costs — that explaining who she is and how she became the woman who tormented McMurphy seems entirely besides the point. You might as well devote a prestige streaming TV season to detailing the route the 'Jaws' shark took to Amity Island." [Rolling Stone]
  • "What starts as a psychological portrait becomes a Jackson Pollock spatter pattern of bloodletting and revenge tragedy. One plot flies east, another flies west; chaos and clutter claim much of the rest." [The New York Times]
  • "By now it's a tired observation to say that Ryan Murphy's shows tend to start strong and fall apart somewhere in the middle, but 'Ratched' breaks all previous Murphy records by lasting exactly thirty minutes before Sarah Paulson as Mildred attempts to seduce a pantsless Corey Stoll with a breathy monologue about her childhood abandonment issues as a prelude to threatening a nurse's children and coercing a mentally ill man to slit his own throat. The over-the-top violence, nonsense plotting, and straight up extraterrestrial behavioral choices that usually taint the later episodes of Murphy's shows are all 'Ratched' has to offer from the start." [Mashable]
  • "The elements of this story are so inelegantly mashed together that they may as well have come out of a blender." [Vanity Fair]
  • "[I]f it's a spectacle you want, that's what 'Ratched' somewhat delivers in its performances and production design. The overall narrative could have used a second opinion, though." [The AV Club]
  • "[T]he hospital's revolving door of patients combined with the show's slippery grasp of mental illness and disabilities makes 'Ratched' feel like a grab bag of trauma rather than even a cursory examination of how badly unwell people have been treated and misunderstood over the years." [Variety]
  • "I was all set to credit 'Ratched' as a glossy misstep, another nice-to-look-at mediocrity from a creative coalition that needs some new ideas. And then I got to the finale, which is one of the worst hours of television I've ever seen, successfully stitching lame soap opera cliches and lame horror cliches into a veritable Frankenstein of dramatic lameness. The clothes are nice, but they're dressing a corpse." [EW]
  • "As a story, it is nonsensical, self-indulgent and unsuccessful at saying anything about Ratched herself except something along the lines of 'people do the darnedest things.'" [NPR]
  • "'Ratched' is a drama so absurd that Sharon Stone playing a vengeful heiress with a monkey on her shoulder isn't the most OTT thing in it." [The Telegraph]
  • "There is nothing redeemable to be found within the folds of these eight hours of television. Nothing! Please, do not let idle curiosity trick you into delving into this wretched enterprise. Haven't we learned over the last six months how precious life is? Why waste it on a show that demonstrates such little interest in the interiority of its characters that you feel insulted on the actors' behalf?" [Vulture]


"Ratched" is available on Netflix today. You can also watch the trailer here:

Pang-Chieh Ho is an editor at Digg.

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