My local PBS station is featuring this show. It makes great use of old Vienna, and technically it looks good. The actors are appealing. The psychology angle is interesting.
The negative is that the story repeats the current tendency of many shows of over-explaining things that don't add to the viewer's experience and rushing into coincidences to make up the plot in the time allotted. Some of the dialogue is filler and speechifying; though I like the actors, the script is only intermittently asking them to provide a multilayered performance, and it's rarely asking that of the guest actors at all. The stories could use thinning out of a scene or two to give more room to accomplish characterization and exposition at the same time.
Related to that---maybe it's just the episodes I've seen, but I find the Jewish identity of the main character and his family to be more signboarding than well integrated into the story.
The negative is that the story repeats the current tendency of many shows of over-explaining things that don't add to the viewer's experience and rushing into coincidences to make up the plot in the time allotted. Some of the dialogue is filler and speechifying; though I like the actors, the script is only intermittently asking them to provide a multilayered performance, and it's rarely asking that of the guest actors at all. The stories could use thinning out of a scene or two to give more room to accomplish characterization and exposition at the same time.
Related to that---maybe it's just the episodes I've seen, but I find the Jewish identity of the main character and his family to be more signboarding than well integrated into the story.