Review: HBO's 'Here and Now' is a convoluted mess of a drama

Kelly Lawler | USA TODAY

Here and Now is as bland and confusing as its title suggests.

The new HBO drama (Sunday, 9 ET/PT, ★ out of four) is about a Portland, Ore.-area family with a mix of adopted and biological children of different races, whose lives are upended when one of them starts having hallucinations. But it also might be a mystic story about how we’re all connected in spite of ethnicity and distance, and how we can solve the world’s problems with love. Or maybe it's a fatalistic and sex-filled version of This Is Us or The Fosters that argues we’re all doomed.

Mostly, Here and Now is a pedantic, torturous mess that's a waste of its great cast and its creator, Alan Ball, who was also behind the network's Six Feet Under and True Blood. But his new series doesn't come close to capturing the cleverness of those shows, though it certainly embraces True Blood's sense of mania.

The show follows Audrey (Holly Hunter), a former therapist, and Greg (Tim Robbins), a philosophy professor, with three adoptive (and adult) children from Vietnam, Liberia and Colombia: Duc (Raymond Lee), a life coach; Ashley (Jerrika Hinton), who runs a retail website; and Ramon (Daniel Zovatto), a student who starts seeing 11:11 everywhere.

The family also includes Kristen (Sosie Bacon), Audrey and Alan's biological teenage daughter, who's having a sexual awakening. Ramon's therapist, Farid Shokrani (Peter Macdissi), also appears prominently, and he and Ramon may have a deeper connection.

The sprawling cast leads to scenes that ricochet between unrelated story lines, and the writers and actors can't make the characters sympathetic. It's hard to believe they make up a family, and not because they look different. They lack chemistry, and while their relationships are supposedly fraught — Duc and Ashley, for instance, often discuss their resentment over their parents' past unconscious racism — there is no spark of hatred among the family members. Several practice random bad behaviors (drugs, adultery, irresponsible sex) without discernible motivation.

And while the characters are hard to parse, the plot is littered with holes and inexplicable twists. Its biggest problem is Ramon, who might be a schizophrenic, as his mother fears, or may have some magical connection to others. While the writers try to leave his condition ambiguous to create mystery, onscreen the series veers from contemporary drama to urban fantasy, its tone see-sawing from the mundane to the mystical.

Worse, it's weighed down by its own self-importance, wading into hot-button topics, including hate crimes and gender fluidity, with all the subtlety and sensitivity of a sledgehammer. The writers unsuccessfully attempt to ascribe capital-M meaning to philosophical debates or campy metaphorical sequences. One character refuses to follow GPS, meant to represent taking control of your life, rejecting technology, or something. Mostly it's just dull.

Here and Now's sloppiness feels like the result of an ambitious (but ill-advised) big swing on the part of Ball, who seems to be trying to create a big, socially relevant series that says something about, well, the here and now. But it doesn't end up saying anything at all.