We knew Baz Luhrman’s Far Downswhich just dropped on Hulu, would be divisive: the show is an edited version of Lurhman’s least popular film, Australia, recut into a six-episode series with piles of new footage. The movie drew quite a few critical brickbats, and now the show is doing the same.
However, let’s start with the positives. RogerEbert.com praised the film’s style, saying it “simply looks better than most modern TV,” while the San Francisco Chronicle offered a nuanced view: “This is old-fashioned storytelling, with all the strengths and weaknesses that the term entails. Luhrmann is a showman who enjoys his own extravagance. Sometimes you feel like it.” But such voices are far from dominant.
What do the negative reviews of Faraway Downs say?
Writing in Australian paper The age, Kylie Northover reluctantly gives the show two and a half stars. The romance between Jackman and Kidman is “hackneyed” with a particularly wooden performance from Kidman, and “the acting is so blatantly bad that it is often compelling.” And while Luhrman’s attempts to highlight the story of the Stolen Generation are well-intentioned, that storyline remains “somewhat superficial.”
The guardPhil Harrison is also not a fan and only gives the show one star. Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman play “two of the worst characters ever” and the series “is as big and empty as the land it explores.” The show is “clunky, confused, exploitative and completely without a good story.”
Variety‘s Aramide Tinubu doesn’t so much give the show both barrels as shoot it repeatedly, cut it into pieces, hit the pieces with a shovel, and then shoot each piece again, for good measure: “If Luhrmann tried the Australian version of Gone with the windWith all the paternalism, magical negroes, and clichés that plagued most Hollywood films during the Golden Age, Faraway Downs would be considered an achievement” and the show “does little to divert the series from pure spectacle, where white people are favored and people of color are sacrificed.”
So it might not end up on our list of the best Hulu shows, but it certainly isn’t getting all negative reviews – at the time of writing, it’s sitting at around 50% on Rotten Tomatoes. If you want to find out for yourself, Faraway Downs is now streaming on Hulu in the US and Disney Plus worldwide.