After Netflix released the very popular House of Cards I was excited to see if they could strike gold again with Hemlock Grove. The trailer looked pretty good and I loved House of Cards so I was very excited for this series. Netflix did not make another Emmy contender here. This series will be as far away from the Emmys this year as it can get. It’s simply a mess.

The premise of Hemlock Grove is pretty simple. A girl is brutally gutted in the woods and two teens team up to find out who did it. Oh yeah, and one of those teens is a gypsy werewolf. The other one is also most likely a vampire. Landon Liboiron plays Peter Rumancek who is the werewolf teen. These rumors are circulating around but no one knows for sure if he is. He teams up with Roman Godfrey (Bill Skarsgard) who’s family basically runs the town of Hemlock Grove. Roman combines blood with sexual pleasure, leading the audience to believe he’s likely a vampire. If he’s not, then what the heck is he? His mother, Olivia, played by Famke Janssen, is a powerful matriarch who doesn’t like Peter and has sex with her brother sometimes. And Roman and his cousin, Letha, are also sort of in a relationship? They hang out and act romantic, and the parents often reference them as if they are a couple. Roman also has a sister who is like 7 feet tall and wears bandages on her hands; she can’t talk, and has a weird eye that she covers with her hair. No one would think it was normal to go to school with someone who looks like this. She also writes letters to her uncle Norman in a horrible voice over. Have I mentioned that most of the acting here is subpar? Especially by Liboiron.

The biggest problem with Hemlock Grove is the story and writing. The point of the show is to investigate who killed this girl, but so far I’m three episodes in and they have done nothing. I also really don’t care. The characters are so one-dimensional that any one of them could die and I couldn’t care less. This is not the recipe for success.

The dialogue here is laughable and unintentionally so. It’s almost as if director and EP Eli Roth was thinking about making a campy werewolf series, then abandoned that idea. Unfortunately the writers still thought they were writing a campy series. There’s a scene in which a criminal profiler working on the cases questions Peter about being a werewolf that is completely outrageous. I don’t know what these writers sound like when they talk to each other, but they clearly don’t know how to write realistic conversations on paper.

Not everything about the show is bad. It’s actually beautiful looking. It’s shot exceedingly well. And not all the acting is bad. Janssen and Skarsgard definitely carry the series. They’re good but the characters are written so poorly that even they can’t save the show.

All in all, the bad far outweighs the good. It’s like watching a far more graphic Twilight with more f-bombs. It’s shallow and thinks it’s more important than it actually is. If it played more into the weird and campy side, it could be so much better. I’ll finish the series just because I like Netflix and am excited for some of their upcoming projects. But if you’re on the fence about starting this one, I say you hop on off, bypass Hemlock Grove and watch reruns of Parks and Recreation. You’ll find more joy in Ron Swanson and Leslie Knoppe than any of these characters.