Undone

I can't recommend this television series highly enough.

If you have access to Amazon Prime, I strongly urge to watch the eight-episode Season 1 of Undone. Yes, it's animated, but in a hyper-realistic way - live-action actor were used for the performances, and the frames were rotoscoped into animated images.  It's a beautiful effect and more than just a gimmick - as the story unfolds, it becomes apparent why that approach was necessary to visually convey what the series is trying to do.

Episode 1 starts the series with an interesting but conventional story about a dysfunctional San Antonio family and lets the viewer adjust to the visuals.  But the plot doesn't really begin to unfold until Episode 2, and by Episode 3 you realize that the creators are swinging for a whole different fence than most other shows could conceive of even in their wildest dreams.  

The show is part slice-of-life domestic drama, part murder mystery (including the not-irrelevant mystery of whether there was a murder at all), and part inquisition into the fabric of time and space.  Also, like the best Philip K. Dick novels, it meditates on the question of what is real and what is schizophrenic delusion, and do those distinctions ultimately make any difference? 

Most of the plot lines are resolved by the end of Episode 7 but the creators add a transcendental Episode 8 to explore some of the effects of the Episode 7 revelations.  By the end of the final Episode 8, I can't imagine there being a Season 2 - the show is so original and the story so complete unto itself, like a snow-globe world untouched by the outside universe, that there's really nothing more to be added, despite the ambiguous Birdman-like final shot.

Undone shows what streaming television is capable of achieving.  The eight 30-minute  episodes are too long for a movie but too short for a network series, especially considering the difficulty of conceiving the possibility of a Season 2.  It's a little too cerebral and edgy even for HBO, so I'm glad that it finally found a home on Amazon Prime, where it can run forever for anyone ever interested in exploring it.

Short version: good show.