Man, this show was such a sad disappointment on rewatch. And it’s so frustrating because it’s not like the show doesn’t have good ideas or isn’t well made. Being made by Mike Flanagan, the show is very well directed and pretty to look at it (Even with some annoying lighting issues and even if the gray and dull color palette of the show doesn’t do too much for me) and all the actors, with what material they’re given, give solid performances. Hamish Linklater and Samantha Sloyan in particular give excellent performances and elevate their characters’ respective material far higher than the crammed and undercooked narrative (Which I’ll get to in a minute) should allow. Other actors like Rahul Kohli, Zach Gilford (For the most part, he can sometimes feel a little stiff), Alex Essoe, Henry Thomas, Kristin Lehman, Annabeth Gish, and Robert Longstreet all give rock solid performances even amidst how little they’re often given to do. Hell, even Kate Siegel (As terrible as her character is) imho, does not deserve the flack she gets sometimes for her performance here. She really does do her best to add life and dimensions to the lifeless shell of a character she’s stuck with, but there’s really only so much she can do. But that’s where the praise completely stops. The rest of the show is chalk full of a complete refusal to show instead of tell as characters constantly just tell us what happened that has facilitated current day events instead of letting us actually see them and feel some sort of attachment to them. Because of this, and how weirdly fast the show moves despite the episodes being so long, it’s so hard to get invested because the show manages to hit the absolute worst sweet spot of being long enough to drag and feel bloated, but still feel overall too short for any real development and intrigue to occur. This makes the eventual buildup to the climax feel so hollow because the show simply does not give itself, nor its audience, enough time and focus to properly flesh out the characters, the setting, or the developing plot, resulting in everything feeling hollow, forced, and severely undercooked. This show is so infuriating because it had so much potential, but was let down by its status as a miniseries, meaning that, similar to what happened with Hill House and Bly, all the ideas and potential on display was inevitably crammed into a space where it had no room to properly breathe and be fully explored. Why on Earth Flanagan insists on continuously suffocating his potential-laden narratives like this, I have no clue.