Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Here And Now’ On HBO Is About A Seriously Messed Up Multiracial Family

Alan Ball created one of HBO’s signature shows, Six Feet Under, and one of its best genre shows, True Blood. Both showed families of various kinds involved in activities that most families would never even think of. His latest series, Here and Now, examines a multiracial family whose issues are mostly internal. Is it interesting, or a whiny mess?

HERE AND NOW: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Flashes of images, then a grainy scene of a sun-splashed Mediterranean beach, like out of a travel film from the ’60s. A woman in a red bathing suit and sunglasses clutches her young son.

The Gist: Ramon Bayer-Boatwright (Daniel Zovatto) has been seeing visions like the one above, which ends with the mother calling his name then tearing her fingernails down her face. He talks about those visions to a barista at his favorite laundromat/cafe (it is Portland, Oregon, after all), Henry (Andy Bean), who he’s been flirting with pretty hard. Henry invites himself to the 60th birthday party Ramon’s mother is throwing for her father.

We find out about the party when his mother, Audrey Bayer (Holly Hunter) calls; she’s in the car with her youngest daughter Kristen (Sosie Bacon), who’s 17, thinks she’s ugly, and wants to find something interesting about herself. It’s understandable, given that her mother was a therapist, her father, Greg Boatwright (Tim Robbins) is a philosophy professor, and her three older siblings were adopted from Liberia, Vietnam and Colombia.

Speaking of those siblings, Duc (Raymond Lee) is a “Motivational Architect” who stresses the here and now with his clients, the same philosophy Greg wrote a book about in his headier days as a professor. Ashley (Jerrika Hinton) is a fashion director for a clothing website who seems to have an idyllic family life with husband Malcolm (Joe Williamson) and daughter Hailey (Avynn Crowder-Jones) but also has a history of doing blow and screwing models and seems to like to lie about working late instead of going home to her family.

Oh, and did we mention that Greg is profoundly depressed? He loves the overbearing, hyperkinetic Audrey, but the idealistic kids they were when they married in the early ’80s are gone, along with the hopeful world they worked to build. His outlet is to have a weekly with a hooker who he knows by her first name and to take praise from his current teaching assistant.

Meanwhile, Ramon’s hallucinations involving the number “1111” get stronger and stronger, culminating at one that almost derails the birthday party because he thinks the house is on fire.

Our Take: We’d like to give Alan Ball the benefit of the doubt here. After all, he not only is Here and Now‘s showrunner, but he wrote and directed the first episode. But, boy, we’re not raring to spend time with the Bayer-Boatwrights after watching that pilot. In fact, we came away from the episode hating each and every character with a white-hot passion.

Listen, we don’t have to like the characters to enjoy a show. But there’s a difference between being unlikable and wanting to take every character by the lapels and say, “stop being such a garbage person!” Everyone in the first episode gives off a combination of pretentiousness, self-loathing, narcissism and out-and-out disregard for the people that love them that makes me wonder if there ever was any happiness in that family to begin with. Ramon only mildly protests when his hook-up wants to meet his parents; Duc is practicing celibacy and won’t tell anyone why; Ashley has no problem stepping out on her seemingly angel of a husband and their daughter. They make the kids from Transparent look like well-adjusted adults by comparison.

And the fact that this is a multiracial family is part of that pretentiousness; Duc and Ashley relate to Ashley’s model buddy Randy (Trent Garrett) about the times Audrey paraded the fact that they’re international adoptees to anyone who was in their presence, trying far too hard to keep them connected to their cultures and not letting them be normal kids. Audrey is so clueless, she speaks broken Spanish to the catering staff of the party even though everyone spoke English, and she knows that Greg is depressed but doesn’t want to press him to reveal why.

If we were the patriarch of this family, we might be depressed too. But does Greg need to seek out a hooker then cry in his Prius by the side of the road? Does he need to make the most depressing birthday speech ever?

Sex and Skin: We see Robbins’ butt as has sex with the hooker, and Ramon and Henry take a sex break before the party.

Parting Shot: As Audrey insists to be a part of Ramon’s psychiatric treatment — highly discouraged by Dr. Farid Shokrani (Peter Macdissi) — Ramon notices the mother and child in the picture is the one from his vision. He asks the doc who’s in the picture, and he says, “My mother. Why?”

Sleeper Star: We’re suckers for cute kids, so if we see more of Crowder-Jones as Hailey, we wouldn’t mind.

Most Pilot-y Line: Kristen loses her virginity to Randy while wearing the horse mask she bought for the party just so she might get some attention. Kudos to Randy for being able to keep things going while looking at a horse’s head.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Ramon’s visions are supposed to shake things up with the family, but we don’t want to be around to find out what happens. Here and Now is so overwrought that it makes The Handmaid’s Tale look like a light-hearted romp by comparison.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Stream Here and Now on HBO Go and HBO Now