Manifest

An interesting premise. Plane takes off and lands 5.5 years later, but to the passengers it seems like they didn't feel it pass. The whole world has moved on and now that they're back, everybody wants a piece of them. It's the usual stuff: relationships destroyed, people passed away, cults, visions, etc. That's all to be expected and the realistic part of it. What made me stop watching were the plot devices: unsaid words and incomplete sentences, obvious lies to one another, secrets made that can't be kept, giving into "fate", etc. To top things off the repetitive overuse of the christian god to explain, judge or support actions. The actors aren't bad and can convey some emotions pretty well, but they could really do without all the obvious plot devices.

It starts out as an interesting series with a lot of mystery, which imo they carried better on the longer term than Lost. But towards the next seasons, the story gets a lot of repetitions, love relationships get dragged out and go in cycles. And for some reason, the writers kept the most annoying characters part of all the season and even gave them plenty of lines. From one point, it just became unbearable to watch. During the last episodes, I just skipped 10s ahead continuously just to finally get to the end. In the first two episodes the mystery is also described as a mysterious higher power, but towards season 3, they just went the lazy route and just called it God acting upon them. As an atheist, this was a total turnoff. A clever writer could have at least kept describing the mystery as an unknown power and let the conclusion be made by the viewer himself. It is a watchable series, but I couldn't bare to watch it again during this lifetime.