Critical Reception
| This section requires expansion. |
At its debut, reviews for the series were mixed. The Orlando Sentinel gave Passions a "bleak prognosis" regarding the Princess Diana controversy: "It is still early days for Passions, but a review published in the Orlando Sentinel gave the soap opera a rather bleak prognosis. Their critic wrote: "A show's dearth of creativity is evident when it shamelessly keeps picking over the bones of the dead. Passions seems to have a death wish." TIME magazine wrote that apart from the show's supernatural elements, "Passions would appear indistinguishable from almost any other soap opera," and that unlike the Orlando Sentinel, the Princess Diana link showed that Passions wasn't "devoid of promise" and that the storyline showed "flashes of a certain kind of genius."
By 2001, Michael Logan of TV Guide remarked of Passions, "There hasn't been this sort of buzz about a soap since the Luke and Laura days on General Hospital...It's unlike anything else out there. There's a real sense of hipness to it."
Craig Tomashoff of The New York Times praised the campy storylines by calling Passions the "Twin Peaks of daytime": "It's a staggeringly psychotic blend of supernatural thriller, melodramatic soap opera and situation comedy, featuring acting that would make a pro wrestler blush. I'm never quite sure whether this is a laughing at or a laughing with kind of show; either way, I'm still laughing."
Read more about this topic: Passions
Famous quotes containing the words critical and/or reception:
“An audience is never wrong. An individual member of it may be an imbecile, but a thousand imbeciles together in the dark—that is critical genius.”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)