It's a failure, but a failure by a director who knows what he wants and has talent himself, and around him, to achieve it. It's beautiful often. I think slavery deserves an extremely punishing depiction and it did that, holy fuking shit. Where Jenkins goes offroad is with montages, melodramatic sound design but especially disjointed storytelling that fails to deliver a coherent story to attach to, at the cost of eternally long atmospheric scenes of insects trilling and slaves being abused

The level of cruelty & misery completely stunned me during/after episode 1. Thing is, I would have rather felt that way, instead of becoming distracted by choices that seemed to be made to enhance viewer emotion. It was as tho the series became over saturated. Agonisingly slow scenes, focusing on surreal elements, drifting storylines, and sound design. It felt like Jenkins was going for more, rather than allowing the depth of the story and actors carry this emotional intensity.

Good production values but I stopped after a few episodes as too bleak

I really wanted to like this, but it suffered from not really knowing what type of show it wanted to be. At times it felt like historical fiction. Then it dipped into fantasy. Then it was a dystopian alternate history. Worlds and characters came and went without much building. Both NC and SC had lots of dystopian things happening but were left after those episodes. Overall, leaving these questions / characters / worlds so quickly felt unfulfilling.