We’ve talked on about how so many streaming series go overboard with the timeline jumps, to the point of distraction. It often feels as if we’re hopping forward and backward and forward again and back again without legitimate dramatic justification. In an early episode of the overwrought and disappointing MGM+ limited series “Emperor of Ocean Park,” this technique is taken to perhaps unprecedented extremes.
It starts in 2007 and then makes all these time jumps from scene to scene in just this one episode: One of the scenes that is set in the year 2009 lasts for all of 20 seconds and features exactly two lines of dialogue. Crazy. That I was compelled to keep such a record tells you how much the gimmick took me out of the story.
Granted, in later episodes, the material is given room to breathe, but even if “Emperor of Ocean Park” had been told in mostly linear fashion, this adaptation of Stephen L. Carter’s 2002 blockbuster novel of the same name most likely wouldn’t have been able to overcome its soap-sudsy tone, the thinly sketched and clichéd characters and the plausibility-stretching plot developments. With a foundation that includes grown siblings fighting for the approval of their powerful and highly critical father even after he has passed away, the adaptation of “Emperor of Ocean Park” has some basic similarities to but it plays more like a mid-level network TV series than awards-bait prestige streaming material.
Even the mighty talents of Forest W.