IRREVERENT: CHARMING AT TIMES, BUT MOSTLY IRRELEVANT

Irreverent is an hour-long dark drama about a criminal mediator from Chicago who is forced to flee for his life and hide out in a small Australian reef community in North Queensland after bungling a mediation between two feuding crime families, and pose as the town’s new church reverend.

The show stars Colin Donnell, who you may have seen on TV shows like The Affair, Arrow and the shows that make up the Chicago Franchise (those being Chicago Fire, Chicago PD and Chicago Med). The show currently has an 63% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but it boasts an Audience Score of 92%. It also has a Metascore of 65 (though that score is based on only 4 critic reviews) on Metacritic, and an 7/10 on IMDB (based on 1200 reviews).

I sometimes balk at shows that use the “fish out of water” troupe and are set in places outside of America, because it is sometimes difficult to get enough of the culture to really understand why certain things are happening, especially in the beginning, but I was looking for something on Peacock that I hadn’t already seen and decided to take a chance.

My immediate first impression, was that the show planned to lean very heavily into the “wacky” territory, kind of like Weeds, Californication or Good Girls, and I wasn’t sure I’d be down to binge ten episodes of that in a forty-eight hour period, but after the first few episodes, the show settled down a bit, and though there were still some moments that were clearly meant to be funny, by the time I got to the fourth or fifth episode, the show’s heart started to come through a bit more.

Casting was just okay. And I feel like casting for shows like this are always a bit of a mixed bag (for me), because, with the show set in Australia, most of the cast would have come from there, obviously, but despite that fact, the acting was decent throughout. P.J. Byre, who plays the real Mackenzie “Mack” Boyd, shines in his role bringing his usual boisterous comedic style to the recurring character.

As for the writing, I felt like the dialogue could be a bit clunky at times, and that’s just a “pet peeve” of mine, but as the story moved along, I felt that the beats from Episode to Episode were fairly strong. The last fifteen minutes of the Season finale were a mess though, and that is another “pet peeve” of mine.

I look at writing a story like taking someone on a plane ride. You can have the smoothest take-off and the most comfortable flight, but if you crash the plane once you get where you’re going, who gives a shit. I think a few of the main characters made decisions that didn’t make very much sense as the writers made an effort to wrap up the season. And of course, the final image was open-ended so we may see a season two depending on how well the show performs on the streamer.

Overall, the show was decent. It’s not a bad way to spend a Saturday or Sunday if you’re lounging around in bed all day and want something to help you pass the time, though I don’t think it’s strong enough to watch more than once.