See

"See" is Steven Knight's Apple TV+ swing at post-apocalyptic pulp, set six centuries after a virus wipes out most of humanity and leaves the survivors blind. Sight is folklore. Society has rebuilt itself around sound, touch, and knotted rope. Jason Momoa plays Baba Voss, tribal war chief of a hidden mountain village, whose new wife gives birth to twins born with the mythical gift of vision. Sylvia Hoeks plays Queen Kane, the zealot ruler who wants those kids found. Alfre Woodard is around as the tribe's spiritual anchor. Francis Lawrence, of "The Hunger Games," directs the pilot and sets the visual template. Episode one hands you the world, the babies, and a very large man swinging a very large blade at people who can't see him coming.

Momoa is doing what Momoa was built to do: growl, protect, and hit things with a hammer the size of a toddler. He's a genuinely warm screen presence, and the show knows it. Knight, the "Peaky Blinders" guy, cares about worldbuilding in a way most streaming fantasy doesn't bother with. The blindness isn't a gimmick you forget about; the fight choreography, the architecture, the way people track each other by breath and footfall — it's all thought through. The production design is real money on screen. Waterfalls, rope bridges, tribal costuming that looks handmade instead of Etsy'd. Hoeks chews on the queen role with total commitment. When the show remembers it's ridiculous and leans in, it rips.

It's also very silly, and not always on purpose. The dialogue reaches for scripture and lands on fortune cookie. Pacing sags between the big set pieces — long stretches of solemn tribal palaver where you're waiting for someone to please pick up a weapon. Some of the plotting is dumb in the way epic fantasy gets dumb when it needs to move pieces around. And the central conceit strains: characters occasionally navigate the world with a spatial awareness that no blind person actually has, because the plot needed them to. Critics were split on season one for good reason. It's uneven.

If you liked "Into the Badlands," the sillier stretches of "Game of Thrones," or any of the Conan-adjacent barbarian stuff, you're the audience. It's a swords-and-sincerity show that wants to be watched with a beer. Viewers who need airtight internal logic, sharp dialogue, and a story that respects their time will tap out during the first council-of-elders scene. Prestige-TV people looking for the next "Severance" are in the wrong theater.

BACKGROUND TV is exactly right. This is a big, expensive, sincerely-made show that never quite decides whether it's a serious meditation on a broken world or a Saturday afternoon fantasy where a huge guy hits people. The craft is real — Knight and Lawrence aren't slumming — but the writing can't clear the bar the production sets, and the pacing doesn't respect a full-attention viewing. It's not preachy; it's just uneven. Put it on while you fold laundry, look up when Momoa starts yelling, don't sweat what you missed. The show forgives you. That's the deal.