User Reviews

The Juliette Lewis character was really annoying, maybe even more than her character from Secrets and Lies, but this show had me intrigued.

Dark, a little slow-moving, kind of depressing really, but definitely interesting television.

If I were to summarise the first episode. Grim & Grimmer.

Derek Cianfrance directed Blue Valentine which I regarded as being uncompromising and bleak. Cianfrance is in his element in this television series. An adaptation of Wally Lamb's novel.

Set in the early 1990s. It starts off with Thomas Birdsey a schizophrenic walking into a library, reciting some passages from the Bible and cutting off his hand. The doctors are aghast with his determination, others would had given up halfway.

His twin brother Dominick, a painter does not sign a consent form for the doctors to reattach the hand, which is only 50/50 that it would be successful.

By the end of episode, Thomas is taken to a high security mental hospital where Dominick knows his brother would be worse off. Dominick vows to get him out of there.

In between the episode has various flashbacks to the twin childhood, born a few minutes apart either side of midnight on New Years Eve. Misery is never far away. The twins never knew their natural father, their stepfather is stern and strict. Their mother has terminal cancer.

Thomas might be mentally ill but Dominick also has issues in his life. He looks like a man who is ready to go off at any moment due to life's cruelties. It is clear that there is a novel at play here. Tragedy will weave through the Birdsey's lives. There is a hint of this as Dominick is going through a manuscript about his grandfather's life.

I Know This Much Is True gets an acting masterclass from Mark Ruffalo. He lost weight to play Dominick, he was meant to put on weight to play Thomas but realised that at his age, Ruffalo might never lose the excess weight.