Family Secrets

Total waste of time. Completely unrealistic plot, poor dialogues and characters making increasingly stupid decisions. Started well, first two episodes were interesting and funny but it went downhill from there, and the convention of the series changed from a pleasant comedy to a very poor mix of absurd comedy, bloody drama and pure nonsense. The series mixes timelines/jumps back and forth between events - I imagine the idea was to let the viewer make up their mind about characters and events, to then make them reevaluate their opinions by revealing new facts and viewpoints - but it failed miserably. Characters would have to be sociopaths and have extremely bad selective amnesia to make it all tie up in any way.

Summary

Family Secrets is a sophisticated ensemble story that exceeds dramatic comedy, combining it with other genres and exhibiting a very ingenious narrative structure, with twists and turns in time combined with changes in point of view that permanently redefine certain situations and the motivations of its characters.

Review

A wedding is constantly interrupted by the hesitations of the future spouses and the interference of their relatives.

For some time now, the series show a certain concern to get out of the chronologically linear stories. Family Secrets is a choral story with skilfully alternate roles that successfully combines their comings and goings in time with a change in point of view, with a return to the same situations but from the perspective of a different character. This adds information about what is happening and the motivations of the characters and modifies its meaning (for the viewer and for the characters), also playing with ambiguity and misunderstanding.

In essence, the series unravels the intricate relationship between the bride and groom and their respective families (the Wilskas and the Jaworowicz). To do this, he also resorts to another constant in modern series: the combination of genres. Family Secrets exceeds the dramatic comedy, since in addition to displaying that dry Polish humor it can (and knows how to) get very serious and quite dark, venturing into noir, going through the comedy of intrigues and the romantic comedy.

As usually happens with these series, and for all these reasons, it takes a while to get into its dynamic (something that also happens with The White Lotus, for example); but sooner or later empathy begins with its great gallery of characters with their respective registers (each one will have their favorites; in my case, Dorota, by Edyta Olszówka), without prejudice to our perception of them changing with time. The running of the chapters in some cases. This goes hand in hand with a great cast, including Eliza Rycembel (Corpus Christi) as the bride and Bartosz Gelner as the groom.

The series sharply focuses on marriage, fidelity, generational conflicts and, tangentially, class conflicts and is quite harsh with the medical and academic world.

Hilarious at first, very dissfunctional families with interesting plot mixing, but the closer to end you get, the more dissappinting it is. Not worth investing your time.

This series is set in Poland, Warsaw (mostly) with interesting settings, albeit everyone seems to be quite rich :-) Actors are playing well and technically it is very well made including sound and music. Polish productions are often lacking in sound quality (especially dialogs), but this one is actually impressive.

If the screenwriter(s) and director have done a good job with the final episodes, it would be a much different review (at least 7 out of 10). Maybe not Game of Thrones bad, but makes you feel you have lost time put into learning the story.

Older viewers will remember Soap the 80s comedy take on Soap Operas. This is a more serious, better acted, sharper scripted and beautifully filmed re-imagining. Yes it is farce-like (and the leapimg about in time is confusing to start but it does start to make sense se eventually so stick with it) so those saying it is unreal are missing the point. As well as some very funny scenes, there are surprisingly tender and moving parts. Don't watch the dubbed version. You always miss out if you don't have the a ties own voices. There are many very good actors in this ensemble. We really enjoyed it. Europeans seem to make really thoughtful television . I hope there is a second series. Highly recommendend.

Seriously? They made long eight episodes with all these uncountable flashbacks to give us nothing in the very end?

The idea of telling story about an neverending wedding day when two unhappy people who even don't love each other and have a very complicated history of the last eight months cannot get married is not bad at all. But not in eight episodes. Not these more and more story plots and characters.

Three or four compact episodes with less characters and with cancelled unnecessary comedy elements and added more developed drama, then it would be excellent. Now it looks like silly soap opera, unfortunately.