Siren premieres March 29th at 8pm on The CW.
By Chris Flanagan
Siren is a drama that centers around the not-yet-CW-quality pretty people of Bristol Cove, WA. The town is widely known for its history of mermaids and has had a delicate coexistence until one of them is kidnapped. This thrusts Ryn, the kidnapped mermaid’s sister, to leave her home and venture upon land in search for her. From there, she encounters characters with only first names such as; Ben, Xander, Maddie, Helen and more who each have their own motives for interacting with Ryn but one thing is very clear, not all will survive the ordeal.
I knew from the very beginning that I would not like Siren, however, I desperately tried over the episodes that were provided to tolerate it. Sadly, I just didn’t take to it. The plot is uninteresting and is semi-supported by even less interesting characters who in several episodes are not even developed enough to be given full names. While Ben, one of the show’s main characters, has a “bad boy of the family” backstory that is lurking around in the background, it is hardly anything that helps provide more layers to who he is in this story. The rest of the cast is forgettable including Ryn. Eline Powell does a good job of channeling the weird quirks that would accompany someone who is on land for the first time, but beyond that, she is extremely off-putting in her lack of speech and mannerisms and ends up spending most of the episode’s runtime getting into trouble only to be bailed out at the last minute by Ben and Maddie, his girlfriend.
Another disappointment was in the show’s story, more specifically, it’s pace of plot development. Across three episodes, Siren barely was able to establish its characters and their motivations for even why they were in the show aside from Ryn’s purpose. There is no clear antagonist which might be on purpose, however, to waste three episodes of a show attempting to establish viewership is not a particularly strong move in the right direction. I easily left with more questions than I arrived with and to make matters worse I pretty much knew they wouldn’t get answered.
On some small level, I almost feel bad just spewing out a negative perspective on a show to the point where I am almost begging you to not watch it, but that is simply where I am at with this article. Siren is not a good show. It is the product of lazy writing, poorly chosen cast, underdeveloped characters that will be passable for a network like Freeform. The craziest thing is that this show might actually be successful on a network such as Freeform because of its target audience and their expectations in terms of television. Siren won’t even come close to changing the TV landscape, but it might actually find a home on Freeform that could lead to it going on for several seasons. I know in my case, I will be nowhere near it because it did not offer me anything to want to come back to each week. My advice, if the word mermaid piques your interest then you might want to give the pilot a try, but proceed with caution.
I give Siren a D-.
TV and City 