"YOU" (LIFETIME CHANNEL SERIES).......THE CURSE OF THE 10 HOUR STRETCH........

You (Lifetime Channel Series) (2018)   We realize that in today's swollen entertainment market, movie deals for novels are few and far between........

             Besides, unlike tireless scribes of the cinema Golden Ages, few of today's screenwriters possess either the talent or ambition to compress a novel into a swift, coherent 2 hour movie.......

             But welcome to the New Age Of Cable & Streaming.......where all those books piled up on the Barnes & Noble New Release shelves can now find renewed life as series that stretch out 10 hours or more......

              Before everyone shouts out 'Hallelujah'! at this idea......we're starting to think of this novelistic mini-series boom as both a blessing and curse......

              Elongating these books out to 10 hour long episodes isn't necessarily healthy for them.....or all that entertaining for us......

              Examples?   Turning the dense, nearly impenetrable "The Alienist" into a lengthy series made the material even more stillborn than it already was.....as compelling to watch as an oil painting.

             And we may find ourselves in the minority here, but we thought HBO's popular adaptation of "Big Little Lies" was drained of most its sardonic humor by the artsy-smartsy pretensions of its director.....

               Which brings us to "You", the Lifetime Channel series based on Caroline Kepnes's best-seller about a sociopath stalker and his prey.

               We already posted on the book and its equally chilling sequel, "Hidden Bodies".....in which Kepnes wittily details the bloody misadventures of charming, serial psychopath Joe Goldberg, a bookstore manager who's a menace to the objects of his affection.

               Think of Joe as a self-absorbed Millennial version of Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley......who barely skates unscathed through all the murders he commits and rationalizes that none of this is really his fault.......(maybe in future books, Kepnes should have him run for President....)

                For the first few episodes, the mini-series version had us at 'Hello'......containing everything we loved about the book........the dark, dark humor, the snappy patter, and for once, a justifiable, clever use of social media to move the plot along.......Based on the first episodes we viewed, we gave it an initial 4 star rave when we posted about it on 9/11/18.......

               We learned our lesson well......BQ will NEVER again review a limited mini-series and gush out love for it until we've sat through ALL the episodes..........

                Our love soon soured.......and for us, so did the series.......as it began to suffer from the enforced bloat of elongating the book into 10 episodes of 65 minutes each......

                 Repetition set in. And even more repetition. And more still.  The show began to look like a serial killer version of 'Groundhog Day'....with the pace slowed down to a crawl as slightly different versions of the same events unfolded over and over again......

                 By the time "You" lurched into its final 10th episode, all the grisly fun and suspense of the book had been drained away. And when the show sprung its last, tacked on, ludicrous twist, we were too busy sighing with relief that we'd come to the end of it......

                 BQ memo to this series' showrunners and writers.........10 friggin' hours?  Sorry, but you folks didn't do anybody any favors.........and you inflated a great book until you turned into a slow moving bore. 1 & 1/2 stars (* 1/2)......(how about a 2 to 3 hour version of "Hidden Bodies"?)