Looking at the reviews, it seems that many people either came in with preconceived notions, or felt that they were required to get huffy over a show actually treating its subject as a real person, with a real life and real problems. Granted, this wasn't the greatest show ever, but it hardly qualified as dreck, especially since a rather large (disturbingly large, in fact) number of people felt that the most important thing they could mention was a sex scene. They seem to be under this bizarre impression that Einstein was a pure physicist who neither ate nor screwed nor indulged in any of the usual vices of humanity (the pipe he so famously kept around was a prop, to be sure, to fool the human beings he might come in contact with.) Even more bizarre is their impression that a season of a show about Einstein that discussed only his science would be a keeper. I grant that audiences for TV shows and movies have been adamantly loyal to productions that discussed the minutiae of fairly esoteric (to the lay audience) scientific formulations, but isn't time we stopped catering to the will of the majority, who love nothing so much as endless reams of scientific argumentation, and start exploring what the tiny percentage that value storytelling and characterization might want to watch.
Let me put it this way -- little that I saw came as a surprise to me because I was, unlike most reviewers here apparently, actually familiar with the kind of man Einstein was. He had a life, one filled with triumphs and failures, with surpassing virtues and undeniable flaws. This was a show about Einstein the man, not just Einstein the physicist. Being a physicist made him famous; being a man made him interesting. The pretentious twaddle of criticizing the show for doing exactly what it promised to do is simply ridiculous, and doesn't somehow make people seem smarter for claiming they wanted more about the physics than the man. If they want to feel smarter, they should go and actually learn the physics. A TV show isn't the way to do that.
Let me put it this way -- little that I saw came as a surprise to me because I was, unlike most reviewers here apparently, actually familiar with the kind of man Einstein was. He had a life, one filled with triumphs and failures, with surpassing virtues and undeniable flaws. This was a show about Einstein the man, not just Einstein the physicist. Being a physicist made him famous; being a man made him interesting. The pretentious twaddle of criticizing the show for doing exactly what it promised to do is simply ridiculous, and doesn't somehow make people seem smarter for claiming they wanted more about the physics than the man. If they want to feel smarter, they should go and actually learn the physics. A TV show isn't the way to do that.