I'm also not in love with the narrative that Netflix DMC is a good show, and the only people who hate it are hardcore DMC fans who are just mad that it changed things/it's non-canon.
Just speaking about season 1 (because I'm not watching season 2), but if you strip it down to the studs, what is the anatomy of an episode?
75% of the dialogue is exposition or repeating something that already just happened on screen. There is no opportunity to allow the action or the characters to breathe because the showrunners are so desperately terrified you will miss something that the characters need to constantly be up your entire asshole explaining every minutia.
The narrative splits time between two main characters, one of whom isn't allowed to do anything of note for practically the entire runtime of the show and just spends all of his screen time getting exposited to while handcuffed. It's dead time that develops neither character, because one isn't on screen and the other is LITERALLY HANDCUFFED from participating in the plot.
There's no space for character growth or development for either character, because so many of the opportunities that could have been used for character building are consumed by characters needing to explain everything that's happening on screen.
Like I encourage you, if you go and watch it, to actually pay attention to just how much dialogue time is dedicated to directly explaining something about the world, something about the characters, or something that just happened instead of just showing you. It's a lot. That's terrible form for a visual medium, where your biggest advantage is that you can show over tell. I'm not even trying to be mean specifically about this show, too. This is how all Netflix shows have been written for the past several years. Live action ATLA had the exact same issue. The writers are literally given the directive to act as though everyone watching is only half paying attention and on their phones the entire time.
And on top of that, the CG isn't particularly good and can even be quite jarring in places. The actual action scenes worth watching are sparse and the flow is constantly broken up by dialogue explaining the action. The metaphors constructed are paper thing and collapse under even the most minor scrutiny (you wanted to show the plight of refugees so you made them LITERAL DEMONS FROM HELL?) The villain motivations make no sense with the established worldbuilding (White Rabbit is trying to save refugees by bringing them to the human world so they can escape Mundus, so his plan is to collapse the barrier standing between the human and demon worlds to... make it easier for Mundus to follow them?)
I'm not so narrow minded that I can't acknowledge quality, even if I don't think it fits for an established series that I love. I will swear up and down that DmC: Devil May Cry is a good game even if it's not a good DMC game, because even though the characters are significant (and worse) deviations from their canon counterparts and the writing is mid at best, it's got a very solid combat system, an enjoyable soundtrack, and the kinds of bombastic set pieces that draw me to DMC as a series.
I go by the standard of "if I could slap another name on this and still enjoy it, then would I be mad about it?" If I could slap another name on DmC: Devil May Cry and disassociate it from DMC proper then I would still pick it up and play it. If I disassociated Netflix DMC from DMC, then I would have the same conclusion. There is nothing in season 1 that makes me think season 2 would be a worthwhile watch, and based on what I'm seeing come out about the show's season 2, I was correct in that assumption.
That this show of all shows can be held up as some kind of quality piece of media is just more evidence that our attention spans are fried to a crisp and media literacy is dead.
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