Unfortunately, despite having all the trappings of a classic soap in the trailer and the available episodes, “What/If” just doesn’t measure up. Renee Zellweger is compelling as a femme fatale, but no one else is as interesting. You care about what her character, Anne Montgomery, is going to do as long as she’s on screen but the moment the camera isn’t on her, you might find yourself starting to drift off.
Plus, while Zellweger’s acting can stand up to the smarmy character Robert Redford plays in “Indecent Proposal,” her co-stars, Jane Levy and Blake Jenner , are no Demi Moore or Woody Harrelson. Zellweger’s Anne is definitely a villain you could love to hate for years to come, but the same can’t be said of the heroes. You don’t care about what their dreams are, or even if they win in the end.
In theory, this is a soap opera, and you can’t expect much in the way of internal consistency across the years of any soap. In execution, though, the 10-episode run of “What/If” is too short for a soap arc to be this bad. The reason soap operas were so popular is because fans invest heavily in the characters. They were willing to follow their favorite characters through everything from vampires to demonic possession to three or five deaths and any number of new faces.
Nighttime soaps are a different animal, sure , and as such they never inspire the same convivial engagement. There’s something about the shared joy of watching a ridiculous living puppet on “Passions” or debating which of Erica Kane’s husbands was the best that just doesn’t translate as well to the more vicious murderous plots so common in evening dramas.
THINK Looks like a plastic surgeon already took an axe to Zellweger.
THINK Is that pile of organised bones resting on that chair really Zellweger ?
THINK Ax her what?