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I have such frustrated feelings about Why Women Kill.
I adored season 1 so much, it was brilliant! The writing was solid, there was a tension to the mystery, parts of it that only unraveled with time.
And this show was actually unique. The way it told three murder mysteries in three different time periods that all shared the same location was incredibly cool. As someone who loves the look of a period piece from the last century, it was so nice to see the costumes, the cars, the sets. The way the show transitioned between time periods too!
That’s not even mentioning the cast, the cast was fucking amazing, I mean, you don’t cast Lucy Liu and don’t get praise for that, that’s a given, but Ginnifer Goodwin and Kirby Howell-Baptiste were also amazing.
An incredibly talented cast that got to work with a solid script in a refreshing concept of story-telling.
And then they just… threw everything unique about the show out of the window in season 2 and made it the most average, mediocre thin, just another run-of-the-mill crime show. Sure, it was still a period piece, but only one period.
The concept of switching between periods, which was the unique and interesting aspect, was gone - and I can only assume that was some stupid greed decision of “oh well, if we keep doing 3 decades a season, we’ll burn through the past century way too fast so let’s slow down!” or something. But I’d rather have had three incredible seasons that had wrapped it on 90 years total and kept the model of story-telling that the show first used, than what the show ended up doing.
Not to mention that there was just… no real… Season 2 lacked appeal. The stories of the three murderesses had intrigue, for one, it wasn’t even entirely clear who would end up the murderer and who would be the victim, and then there was compassion woven in too. They were complex. Season 2 just fell incredibly flat and was so much more predictable.
It was also such a drag. Because it had one story that it told over the span of the same length as season 1, which told three stories. So they stretched this out to trice the length it should have needed.
All of this is to say, I wasn’t surprised when this show got cancelled after season 2, because of course did it get cancelled after season 2. In a sea of shows that get cancelled too early, this one actually did that to itself by self-sabotaging so hard.
And yeah, I’m still mad about that, because I just rewatched Sandman and saw Kirby and was reminded of Why Women Kill season 1 and how great this show could have been if it had kept the anthology format of telling multiple stories within one season, if it had managed to keep even just half the quality of season 1.