Best Interests is supposed to be 'moving' and 'tug at heartstrings' but by the midst of episode 3, it's hard to really root for any of the characters.
The good is that a major aspect feels authentic, and that is the toll being a carer can take on virtually everything in your life - no matter how much you don't want that to happen. That part is genuine and feeling the inability to talk to to anyone about how difficult it is for those in the midst of it & how difficult it is for those around them to respond or know how to help, what to say, etc.
The bad is that they've tried to pack too much in to a show that doesn't feel conducive to it in an organic way. The writers have a hollow gay sister, an uncle with Asperger's, multiple disabled, but save for a little boy, it feel like they're intentionally type casting disabled actors to tick boxes. The gay sister's friend or love interest (or whatever she's supposed to be) is just as unlikeable in this as she is in Conversations With Friends, and just as hollow.
Best Interests seems to be yet another in an unending line of shows from what appear to be Gen Z or (barely) millennial writers who feel the need to pay lip service to diversity and hating everything about every generation other than their own. In areas where one hopes for dialogue that's genuinely meaningful, someone has to go off on a tangent.
To be perfectly blunt, it's not often I find myself looking at the time left before an episode is over, but I've done it with each episode in the series thus far. You know they want you to empathise and in a weirdly detached sort of way, you empathise with the younger, hospitalised sister for multiple reasons while watching the other characters fall apart and not really feeling much of anything for them. You should, but they're so tedious, intellectually you can empathise in terms of it happening you, yet not in a way that makes you genuinely care about them. That's not exactly a mark of brilliant television or acting.
Best Interests feels drawn out, at times disjointed and a project that could have had a bigger impact had there been stronger execution and better casting. Aside from the little girl who plays Marnie & the lad who plays George, there simply isn't chemistry between the actors that makes you believe these characters are real people or a real family. Individually, most of the actors are perfectly fine and it isn't that they're terrible - they simply lack chemistry.
I was watching because I was bored, but I think I'm going back to re-runs of other shows. There are worse things to watch, but there is also plenty that's better.
