"Stranded in the wilderness following a plane crash" is practically its own genre at this point, and, with the stellar Yellowjackets still fresh in viewers' minds, any similar shows have a lot to live up to. Keep Breathing crash-lands into genre, using a flashback-driven structure that's strongly reminiscent of Lost — and while lead Melissa Barrera brings plenty of intensity to her survival story, her strong performance is undermined by the clunky, clichéd backstory.
Successful, self-destructive Manhattan lawyer Liv gets lost in the Canadian backwoods after she hitches a ride in a small plane en route to Inuvik, NT. It crashes in a lake surrounded by spectacularly beautiful, forested mountains in what is unmistakably the Pacific Northwest (which is completely in the wrong direction for anyone going from New York to Inuvik, but I digress).
The intense first episode is a compelling story of survival, as Liv learns more about what her flight companions are doing up north, and she struggles to, ahem, keep breathing in the immediate aftermath of the crash. But after this promising beginning, Keep Breathing becomes increasingly preoccupied with Liv's backstory, jumping between various timelines: her childhood with a mentally unwell mother who abandons her, and her unstable adulthood as a high-powered lawyer embroiled in an office romance. She's visited by visions of these characters while she's stranded in the wildness, which seems to be a narrative device, although there's also a brief suggestion that she may be having delusions due to an unspecified mental illness.
Towards the end of the six-episode run, the show practically forgets about her wilderness survival, touching base with her just long enough for her to tumble off some precipice or other, resulting in another bout of fever-dream flashbacks.
While these flashbacks are clearly intended to make the audience invested in her survival, they're mostly alienating — particularly her tumultuous love story with fellow lawyer Danny (Jeff Wilbusch). He pursues her relentlessly, offering the rock-steady affection that her mother was unable to provide — except that Liv is so consistently mean to Danny, the whole thing is more pathetic than it is sympathetic. Keep Breathing's backstory is pulpy and salacious, seemingly only interested in characters insofar as they're getting blackout drunk, becoming manic, or screaming "fuck off" at loved ones.
Keep Breathing has promise as a straight-up wilderness survival story, but as soapy drama, it's more like the CW than prestige TV.
(Netflix)Successful, self-destructive Manhattan lawyer Liv gets lost in the Canadian backwoods after she hitches a ride in a small plane en route to Inuvik, NT. It crashes in a lake surrounded by spectacularly beautiful, forested mountains in what is unmistakably the Pacific Northwest (which is completely in the wrong direction for anyone going from New York to Inuvik, but I digress).
The intense first episode is a compelling story of survival, as Liv learns more about what her flight companions are doing up north, and she struggles to, ahem, keep breathing in the immediate aftermath of the crash. But after this promising beginning, Keep Breathing becomes increasingly preoccupied with Liv's backstory, jumping between various timelines: her childhood with a mentally unwell mother who abandons her, and her unstable adulthood as a high-powered lawyer embroiled in an office romance. She's visited by visions of these characters while she's stranded in the wildness, which seems to be a narrative device, although there's also a brief suggestion that she may be having delusions due to an unspecified mental illness.
Towards the end of the six-episode run, the show practically forgets about her wilderness survival, touching base with her just long enough for her to tumble off some precipice or other, resulting in another bout of fever-dream flashbacks.
While these flashbacks are clearly intended to make the audience invested in her survival, they're mostly alienating — particularly her tumultuous love story with fellow lawyer Danny (Jeff Wilbusch). He pursues her relentlessly, offering the rock-steady affection that her mother was unable to provide — except that Liv is so consistently mean to Danny, the whole thing is more pathetic than it is sympathetic. Keep Breathing's backstory is pulpy and salacious, seemingly only interested in characters insofar as they're getting blackout drunk, becoming manic, or screaming "fuck off" at loved ones.
Keep Breathing has promise as a straight-up wilderness survival story, but as soapy drama, it's more like the CW than prestige TV.
