Titles like Stranger Things, The Sea Beast, and The Gray Man may have buoyed Netflix in recent weeks, but the streamer’s latest thriller series, Keep Breathing, has suffered a critical setback.
The six-episode limited series follows Melissa Barrera’s Liv, a young lawyer who finds herself in a struggle for survival when her private plane crashes deep in the Canadian wilderness.
Keep Breathing hit Netflix on July 28, and while the show wasn’t given all that much time to breathe with general audiences, reviewers were less than thrilled with its familiar premise (see Yellowjackets, The Wilds) and monotonous storytelling.
For a bird’s-eye view of the series’ critical performance to date, Keep Breathing currently has a low rating of 38% on review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes (opens in new tab) and a similarly disappointing score of 5.2 on IMDb (opens in new tab). .
“Whereas its predecessors were inventive in their approach, Keep Breathing plods along, wearisomely unrealistic and painfully predictable,” wrote The Independent (opens in new tab), while The Guardian (opens in new tab) called the series “such a boring survival drama”. said it will put you to sleep.”
CNN (opens in new tab) was equally unforgiving in its assessment: “The episodes are relatively and mercifully short, with most running around 30 minutes; Still, the show doesn’t quite escape the general impression of a film concept stretching to about twice the length.”
Many critics (including those from Decider (opens in new tab) and Variety (opens in new tab)) at least praised Melissa Barrera’s performance as the show’s lead, though most still found Keep Breathing to be a lackluster version of a tried-and-true formula .
For example, IGN (opens in a new tab) said, “Keep Breathing is well photographed, well acted and well intentioned. But as far as the story itself goes, there’s just no reason to watch this mediocre approach to the survival genre when there are so many other shows that have done it better.”
Analysis: critics be damned?
Despite the series’ less than glamorous reception, recent trends suggest that Keep Breathing will still manage to make it to the top echelons of Netflix’s weekly top 10 ranking for an extended period of time (it’s already the biggest show on Netflix UK). See the article : Mike Moon is leaving Netflix as head of adult animation.
In 2022, countless critically tipped movies and TV shows have risen to the top of the streamer’s popularity charts, and Keep Breathing’s easy-to-digest structure — each episode lasts only 30 to 40 minutes — will inevitably work in its favor.
What’s more, Netflix subscribers have proven that they don’t care much about critics’ opinions. Take Take 365 Days: This Day, for example, which briefly became the most popular film on the streamer despite a miserable 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Or Interceptor, which defied its label as a “horrible, horrible, not good, very bad movie” to also hit number one in its first week of release.
On the TV front, Anatomy of a Scandal shot to the top of the platform’s most-watched charts despite its largely negative critical reception, while the “very hard to watch” First Kill also defied its critics.
The point is that viewership, for better or worse, is the number one measure of success for Netflix in its precarious current state, and company executives will be more than happy to weather Keep Breathing’s critical storm when the series ships the goods in Reference to numbers provides front side.
Axel is a London-based editor at TechRadar and covers everything from the latest Tesla models to the latest movies for the site’s daily news edition. Having previously written for publications such as Esquire and FourFourTwo, Axel is well versed in the applications of technology beyond the desktop, and a degree in English Literature means he can occasionally be seen incorporating Hemingway quotes into electric sports car stories inserts
Axel is a London-based editor at TechRadar and covers everything from the latest Tesla models to the latest movies for the site’s daily news edition. Having previously written for publications such as Esquire and FourFourTwo, Axel is well versed in the applications of technology beyond the desktop, and a degree in English Literature means he can occasionally be seen incorporating Hemingway quotes into electric sports car stories inserts
