So does the California coast where the show's central mental hospital is located, while the hospital itself looks more like an elegant old hotel than any type of facility. What a great cast! And in their sherbert-hued suits, minty-green medical uniforms, and matching hats for every ensemble, they all look great. There are other over-the-top and yet nonsensical characters hanging around: Finn Wittrock's deranged murderer, Judy Davis as Ratched's rival Nurse Bucket, Sharon Stone swanning around with a monkey on her shoulder, Cynthia Nixon as a political operative who attempts a romance with Ratched. Paulson is good enough to make her character ring true in each individual scene, but her motivation doesn't make sense, so she's tough to root for. She's sympathetic and maternal one moment, an uptight scold in another, robotically calculating at other times. Then, too, this version of Nurse Ratched's story is too goofy to make logical sense: We don't understand who this character is and why she does what she does. Giving her a backstory to make her more sympathetic is not only beside the point, it's counter to it. The brilliance of Fletcher's Oscar-winning performance in the original Cuckoo's Nest was that her character was hardly human at all: She was a cog in an inhuman machine that ground its patients down, and she was as merciless as the machine itself. The first problem is in Ratched's conception. Sarah Paulson is always compelling and magnetic, and the vibrant period costumes and settings look like a million bucks, but the muddled plot and characterizations doom this series to "meh" status. Characters take prescribed medications and also take or are given inappropriate medications. Many characters smoke cigarettes. Most characters have hidden motivations and will do anything, up to and including murder, to realize their aims. Language is infrequent: "damn," "hell," "s-t." Scenes take place in bars with characters drinking no one acts drunk. The show's LGBTQ+ characters are treated as if they have mental disorders, and doctors and nurses try to "cure" their sexuality (we understand that these medical professionals are in the wrong, however). Sexual content is also mature, with same- and opposite-sex kissing, flirting, and dating, and scenes in which characters have sex with rhythmic motions and moans (though no nudity). A recurring theme is that authority is not to be trusted, with duplicitous characters who misuse power in the political and medical fields. There are other scenes of violent death, and many scenes that involve medical abuse: A patient is trapped in a tub full of boiling water patients are lobotomized in front of a crowd with an ice pick and a drill. We see the murders in a scene that's typical of Ratched's violence: Priests are stabbed in the neck and stomach, their heads bashed until they die we see a bloody dead body in a tub, and see blood spurting and in pools on the ground. In this series, a younger Nurse Ratched takes a job at a mental health facility after her younger brother is committed there following a mass murder. Parents need to know that Ratched is a series by Ryan Murphy ( American Horror Story) loosely based around the character Nurse Ratched from 1975's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
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