I'm glad you're enjoying it! Progeny wanted to see it when it first ran, so I watched it though it had a lot of content I found difficult (as you mention above). I love the five regulars. But now I'm having trouble remembering much detail of the first season, and I certainly can't remember what happened in which episode.
acerbic proto-child-psychologist Laszlo Kreizler (endlessly gentle and sympathetic with his child clients, a complete asshole to adults) Perfect! Even to his friends.
I also love Ted Levine as Chief Byrnes. He's awful and has so much fun with it! He does develop some more nuance later (but that might be second season, which I saw more recently).
I became very fond of Marcus and Lucius too.
My obscure complaint is that they seem to be working so hard on the accents, yet they missed something that I found very jarring: Sara and John should both have non-rhotic accents for late nineteenth-century New York (New England upbringing for at least one of them, if I remember correctly): dropping r's at the ends of syllables. They don't. That would have made me very happy.
But I love Sara. I find her believable—not a twenty-first century woman imagined back into the late nineteenth, but a nineteenth-century woman not happy with her options and determined to make some new ones. And, as you say, you can see the cost of fighting for that, even though she won't let it stop her.
Brühl is amazing as Kreizler. You say "puppy eyes," but when they're fixed on someone he's questioning or doesn't like, I see nothing but steel! And he's trying to figure everyone else out while he doesn't want them to figure him out—maybe partly because telling them what he has figured out distracts them from what he doesn't want them to notice.
no subject
acerbic proto-child-psychologist Laszlo Kreizler (endlessly gentle and sympathetic with his child clients, a complete asshole to adults)
Perfect! Even to his friends.
I also love Ted Levine as Chief Byrnes. He's awful and has so much fun with it! He does develop some more nuance later (but that might be second season, which I saw more recently).
I became very fond of Marcus and Lucius too.
My obscure complaint is that they seem to be working so hard on the accents, yet they missed something that I found very jarring: Sara and John should both have non-rhotic accents for late nineteenth-century New York (New England upbringing for at least one of them, if I remember correctly): dropping r's at the ends of syllables. They don't. That would have made me very happy.
But I love Sara. I find her believable—not a twenty-first century woman imagined back into the late nineteenth, but a nineteenth-century woman not happy with her options and determined to make some new ones. And, as you say, you can see the cost of fighting for that, even though she won't let it stop her.
Brühl is amazing as Kreizler. You say "puppy eyes," but when they're fixed on someone he's questioning or doesn't like, I see nothing but steel! And he's trying to figure everyone else out while he doesn't want them to figure him out—maybe partly because telling them what he has figured out distracts them from what he doesn't want them to notice.