White Lines‘ first season tried to do a lot of things, and that kind of ambition is worth praising. Zoe’s midlife crisis, her romance with Boxer, the Calafat family drama, Marcus’s third-time loser routine, David and his spirituality and drugs, Anna and her sexuality and drugs, raising teenage children, the sideplot about Zoe and Axel’s dad, Ibiza, house music—it’s all in there, and all of it is handled more or less well. But the whole isn’t so much less than the sum of its parts as it is a jumble of them thrown together, all of them prominent but none of them truly emerging as what this show is about. Its hedonistic pleasures are undeniable. But like many of its questing characters, I want more.

I reviewed the season finale of White Lines for Decider.

With one episode in the season remaining, it’s worth taking stock of how far we’ve come. The jumpy timeframe and the rapidity with which these characters form and break bonds makes it easy to forget that Boxer brutally murdered two guys a few days ago, and that Zoe and Marcus are both involved in the cover up. Instead, the show focuses on their personal growth journeys, their sex lives, the question of whether they’re in love and if so who with. I can’t quite square that with the same people who hauled dead bodies out of the water and buried them in a shallow grave, you know? It seems like that would take precedence in their psychological landscape.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of White Lines Season One for Decider.

To paraphrase Lenin, there are episodes of White Lines where whole seasons happen. This is one of those. Boy, is it ever!

I reviewed the eighth episode of White Lines for Decider.

There’s a part of me who’s down with White Lines just for the fun of it. That’s probably something the characters could relate to, no? The beautiful setting, the beautiful people, the rampant hedonism, the sex scenes, monster acid house tracks like A Guy Called Gerald’s “Voodoo Ray” on the soundtrack—it’s kind of hard to resist! Almost enough to forget, you know, the murders!

I reviewed episode seven of White Lines for Decider.

You know, after a long day of looking at photos of my murdered brother picking street fights and pulling his own tooth out of his mouth with a pair of pliers, going scuba diving to retrieve my friend’s lost cocaine, accidentally uncovering a pair of dead bodies, holding them beneath the surface in order to prevent the police from finding them, loading them into a boat and accidentally driving into the middle of a religious procession, watching the metal rods in my friend’s broken legs accidentally tear free, driving the boat into the middle of nowhere until my car stalls out, dragging the boat halfway across a field by hand, calling the murderer with whom I had a one-night stand for help, and burying the bodies and the drugs in a rainstorm, there’s nothing quite like having sex on top of a wet and shallow grave to take the edge off.

I reviewed episode six of White Lines for Netflix.

Things are getting sexy on White Lines.

I reviewed the fifth episode of White Lines for Decider.

This is a plot-dense episode, and some of the show’s storytelling decisions are a bit baffling to me, I must admit. Take the big fight Boxer and Zoe have when he chews her out for being ungrateful for his help. (At this point she’s unaware that his “help” included a double homicide.) We see Boxer blow up at her and kick her out, we see her bump into Kika and Kika’s fuckbuddy Sissy on the way out, we see her dance, we see her bring up the fight—and then we get a flashback to the fight that adds a few sentences and a few household items thrown in anger but is otherwise much the same. In other words, there wasn’t some secret about the fight that was withheld, there’s no big revelation in the flashback to events that happened just minutes prior; the flashback just kind of happens, and that’s that. If you squint at it hard enough you can maybe see the show making a point about selective recollection of events—the whole series does revolve around a murder the details surrounding which no one present can remember—but since the initial view and the revisit show basically the same thing, I’m not sure that explanation washes.

I wrote about episode four of White Lines for Decider. Things are starting to get hinky.

Well, we learned a lot about what kind of show White Lines is in Episode 3. Is it the kind of show that will drop music cues by the Happy Mondays or that screaming cowboy song for atmosphere? Yes, but we knew that. Is it the kind of show that derives a lot of mileage from the extremely photogenic people playing the late DJ Axel Collins and his apparent mother-daughter love interests Conchita and Kika Calafat? Also yes, and we knew that too.

But the incestuous overtones, not just to Axel having sex with two women from the same family but also Conchita’s casual toplessness in front of and intimate embrace of her son Oriol? That’s new. The high-speed chase that begins the episode, in which Boxer and Zoe deal with the problem of having seven kilos of coke in their car by racing away from the cops and dumping it out the windows as they go? Also new.

And you know what else is new? The brutal violence.

I reviewed the third episode of White Lines for Decider.