Red Rose - TV Review - Valerii Deshevykh

Michael Clarkson and Paul Clarkson’s new series, Red Rose, who has written on projects such as The Wheel of Time, See, and The Haunting of Bly Manor, is a series that promises a lot but fails to live up to its promises towards the end. The cast of the BBC UK series is full of young talents with high potential. However, with the withdrawal of one of them after the second episode, the series collapses like Jenga. The series remains a mediocre show due to the fact that only one actor is given a chance in the character design, and the depths of the rest do not contribute to the series.

Let’s briefly touch on the subject… While Rochelle Mason is dying to celebrate the end of the term with her friends, she is devastated when she sees the boy she likes with her best friend. Suddenly a message comes to rescue her from her loneliness. Installing an application called Red Rose on the phone, Rochelle begins to do what the application tells her. This small and confidential game, which proceeds in a way that makes her happy at first, turns into a dangerous union over time.

The Show is building its relationship with us through the application called Red Rose and its first user Isis Hainsworth, who plays Rochelle Mason. We start to get to know Rochelle better by joining into her family and her daily struggles. The series also conveys to us why Rochelle, who we see has a difficult life, can rely on an application like Red Rose. The series starts as a series that depends on Isis Hainsworth, and Isis gives justice to it. I am also glad that Isis, who I thought was an extraordinary actress with high potential, did not mislead me.

However, when the series removes Isis, the story’s pace suddenly drops, and the plot of the series loses its way. When the story started with Rochelle, the show’s main villain-app Red Rose was a more exciting and tense getaway. However, with the departure of Isis from the series, the story suddenly turns into a simple detective adventure and a common hacker story. No matter how attractive the sociopath hacker story is, post-Isis episodes are a bit boring because the series didn’t set up for this. Like, the whole show depended on Isis’ first 2 episode performance. And let’s be honest, Isis’ acting is far better than other actors’. Because she has a better-designed character and she is obviously a talented future-star. But after she departs from the series, acting quality abruptly declines.

Red Rose, a program concocted by a group of sociopaths who want to take advantage of social media’s destructive power, is closer to the movie, in my opinion. An 8-episode series elongated the subject like chewing gum. If it was a film and the subject was based on a single character and her friends, it would have been a much more enjoyable and tense job to watch. However, it is the screenwriter’s fault. They made Rochelle’s character design wonderful, yet they did not focus on the rest. Some characters lack depth and have unnecessary imports.

To sum it up… Red Rose is about teenagers haunted by sociopathic hackers. But in the opening, the series draws its strength from Rochelle’s drama. And the story loses its tempo when they pulled the story that Isis gave us with her outstanding acting and character design in the first 2 episodes. I think the 4 episodes after Isis are pretty dull; although they got it together in the last two episodes, yet they couldn’t reach the required climax in the finale. I welcome the fact that they have opened the door to future seasons; I hope they do not make the mistake of starting the story with one character drama in a possible second season and then spreading it to the general.