So ready to see where this leads. Acting? Phenomenal. Writing? Amazing. Direction? Flawless. SOUND DESIGN?! I'm in love. One episode and I'm hooked. One episode, and I need to draw my circle too...

I LOVE a good horror miniseries, especially in the fall! At only four episodes, Circles is perfect to knock out in one single cloudy fall afternoon--or, if you’re feeling extra spicy, with the lights out at night... Circles feels like a Stephen King/Buffy/Scooby Doo mashup in all the best ways--a group of former-friends reuniting to face the entity they summoned years ago, an entity that can only be kept away if you stay within your chalk circle, that can take on faces and voices and shapes of all kinds to draw you out. There are endless audio Easter Eggs to dive into that really make the show hold up on relisten and the show plays excellently off of the (super relatable!) fears that come from isolation and paranoia. Because the characters have grown apart geographically over the years, they’re in their circles in some cases countries apart, only talking over the phone, and the seeds of distrust are sown deep and early--we only hear what the characters themselves hear, and the point of view is constantly shifting, so any of these narrators could be unreliable, very much not who they say they are, or different from one call to the next. It’s a narrative convention that is creative, fun, extremely scary, and very engaging as a listener--it’s a show that practically invites you to argue with a friend about who is trustworthy and who totally, definitely, absolutely isn’t.

The characters are very thinly sketched. This wouldn't necessarily be a problem but the climax of the show hinges on you being invested in the fears and wishes and loves of the characters, which the show hadn't bothered to articulate prior to that point. For instance, one character proclaims that she's always been in love with another character and it's a classic tell, don't show problem. If you don't show that a character is in love through word and deed, then you've not written a character who is in love, you've written an author avatar telling the audience their in love. And there are other characters who don't feel like they've lived a life outside of two instances in their life. By this I don't mean, characters trapped by their traumas. I mean characters who only exist when they appear "onscreen" and reflect zero life experience over decades.