Review Roundup: RATCHED on Netflix, Starring Sarah Paulson
See what the critics had to say.
By: Sarah Jae Leiber Sep. 16, 2020
"Ratched" is coming to Netflix! The Ryan Murphy series, starring Sarah Paulson, premieres this Friday, September 18th.
RATCHED was inspired by the iconic and unforgettable character of Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and was created by Evan Romansky.
The series stars Sarah Paulson as Mildred Ratched, Cynthia Nixon as Gwendolyn Briggs, Judy Davis as Nurse Betsy Bucket, Sharon Stone as Lenore Osgood, Jon Jon Briones as Dr. Richard Hanover, Finn Wittrock as Edmund Tolleson, Charlie Carver as Huck, Alice Englert as Dolly, Amanda Plummer as Louise, Corey Stoll as Charles Wainwright, Sophie Okonedo as Charlotte and Vincent D'Onofrio as Gov. George Wilburn. The series is executive produced by Ryan Murphy, Ian Brennan, Sarah Paulson, Alexis Martin Woodall, Aleen Keshishian, Jacob Epstein, Jennifer Salt, Margaret Riley, Michael Douglas, Robert Mitas and Tim Minear.
The critics have spoken...
Caroline Framke, Variety: "There will undoubtedly be enough viewers who just want a quick dose of creepy body horror this autumn without thinking too hard about What It All Means. But the series' inability to sell its most personally devastating moments keeps "Ratched" from ever being as effective as it could be."
Monica Castillo, The AV Club: "Despite her character's baffling contradictions, Paulson's Ratched is fairly delightful. Unlike Louise Fletcher's version of the character in the movie adaptation of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, there's still some vulnerability left in this Ratched."
Sonia Saraiya, Vanity Fair: "But what's striking about Ratched is just how scattershot and incoherent its characterization is, both as a backstory for Nurse Mildred Ratched-played by Murphy's muse Sarah Paulson-and as a narrative."
Nicholas Barber, BBC: "Imagine all of the most charismatic and dangerous characters from Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal, Psycho, Vertigo and Basic Instinct gathered in a small Northern Californian town in the 1940s, and you'll have a flavour of the lavish banquet of death, depravity and designer millinery that Ratched serves up."
Dave Nemetz, TVLine: "Still, Ratched - the latest offering from uber producer Ryan Murphy - insists on conjuring up an origin story for her anyway: a campy, gruesome, punishingly dreary melodrama that feels like a rejected concept for an American Horror Story season... and should've remained on the reject pile."
Drew Taylor, Collider: "Beautifully portrayed by Paulson, you'll get to understand her tragic backstory (partially told, in a particularly bravura episode, through a children's puppet theater), her conflicted sexuality (she enters into a cloak-and-dagger relationship with a closeted lesbian played by Cynthia Nixon), and how her desire to actually help people has been corrupted and perverted, leaving her as someone who is just as likely to harm as to help."
Laura Bogart, RogerEbert.com: "This devotion compels into her great manipulation and violence of her own, allowing Paulson a symphonic range of emotion: Her Mildred vacillates between diamond sharp focus and Machiavellian cunning as she maneuvers to become the right hand woman of the hospital chief, Dr. Richard Hanover (Jon Jon Briones)."
Darren Frainch, Entertainment Weekly: "The series knows how to wave its price tag in your face. Mildred drives into postwar Lucia, Calif., and finds a town full of coastal color and Crayola fashion. In the premiere, she crosses Bixby Bridge and finds a cheap cliffside motel with a view right over the ocean. The location shooting is fun, and the sets are big for horizons."
Brandon Katz, The Observer: "In typical Murphy fashion, Ratched is dark and psychological, overwrought with aesthetic affectations and still watchable in spite of itself. Murphy has always loved to externalize emotions and mental states with striking color palettes, and it's no different here."
Inkoo Kang, The Hollywood Reporter: "The series welds the American Horror Story elements to a soap-operatic noir mystery, with a private eye (Corey Stoll) staying in Mildred's motel eventually bringing to town his eccentric gajillionaire client Lenore Osgood (Sharon Stone), who wears matching dresses with the monkey always on her shoulder. (That sight alone might be worth watching Ratched for.)"
Alexandra Pollard, The Independent: "I had assumed that as the season progressed Mildred would succumb to her darkest impulses, gradually losing herself to the monster within. The opposite happens. Mildred most resembles the Cuckoo's Nest version of Nurse Ratched at the very start: she is calm, sinister, does frightening things in a misguided attempt to protect someone close to her."
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