3 out of 5

Created by: Martin Gero and Brendan Gall

I was a bit surprised to see that Keep Breathing did not review more positively, but in digging deeper into the feedback, I think I’m experiencing the good fortune of coming to something late. The six-episode mini-series is definitely a mixed bag of focuses, preventing any of those focuses from actually getting full attention, but I found that main writers and co-creators Brendan Gall’s & Martin Gero’s method of slowly switching out one such focus for another – as opposed to juggling them all at once – kept me quite engaged from start to finish. Meanwhile, had I been present for the up-front press of the show, it seems I would’ve been promised a survivalist thriller, and it’s really neither one of those things – either a hard survival story or, strictly, a thriller. And so if you latch on to those genre tags too strongly, you’re bound to be either disappointed or even pissed off when the show kind of ditches them and starts – somewhat thematically purposefully – spinning its wheels.

Attorney Liv (Melissa Barrera) is in need of securing a flight to a remote destination; she’s meeting someone there. Only the airline seems ambivalent to this, and the deadline she has for that meeting, with several flight cancellations sending her into a tizzy.

After screaming pointlessly at an attendant, who can’t much help her book a flight that doesn’t exist, she overhears a man walking by discussing a private flight he and his co-pilot are taking to exactly her destination; she tosses money at them to join. Some romcom, fish-out-of-water vibes aboard this flight are dashed when engine troubles send the plane crashing into the wilds of Canada. Liv is the only survivor.

…And being a big city lawyer, there’s a learning curve to that. There’s the acceptance of being stranded, and the lessons we kind of expect: finding resources; eating the wrong berry. Liv, as told through flashbacks of an up-and-down relationship with a work mate (Jeff Wilbusch), struggles with being career-first, and is not the most pleasant protagonist from that point of view, alongside her earlier outburst we witnessed. Keep Breathing does not try to redirect this, and is instead impressionistic with the background it gives us, stepping into Liv’s childhood to help us understand why she was taking this flight, and what brought her to this point in her life overall, but doing so in repeating, overlapping flashes. Barrera is able to flip between vociferous and muted acting styles that pulls off self-reflection and denial in equal parts; she is obviously going to be the focus of the show, though is assisted by blurred figures speaking to her, representing voices in her head – people from her life, or people she just met – often telling her to give up and so on. All of this is to say that if you’re rubbed the wrong way by her personality, it’s going to be difficult to go along for the ride.

Especially given the aforementioned wheel-spinning. There’s one representation of this that I really liked, which is that this big city lawyer doesn’t exactly learn the lay of the land overnight, or have a miraculous memory that recalls some specific detail about poisonous flowers or etc: she learns about things very naturally (in a way that made me feel, for once, like non-survivalist me could probably do as well), and continues to make a lot of very dumb mistakes. Some of these are, admittedly, beyond the pale, haphazardly getting rid of things that might be useful, but it vibes with the character essentially just moving forward, and not wanting to look back. And the writers do start to go a bit too far towards fiction with this, making it distractingly questionable how Liv would actually be up and about after various injuries, and without much food and water. But most of the time, we walk a tantalizing tightrope above survival that makes the character’s little victories very satisfying, and her ignorances appropriately frustrating.

The other wheel-spinning, though, becomes the main drawback. After about the midway point, we shift more dramatically towards reviewing Liv’s past versus figuring out how her next meal. Her story has traumatic notes we’ve seen before, but I didn’t mind that: again, Keep Breathing tries to sketch out Liv as a normal person. With some tragedies, but not ones that have to break the pity bank. She’s a real person, doubling down on a “this could be you” feeling that I do think kept me invested. However, while this might make sense conceptually, narratively, we start to feel the wear – and become aware – of the unchanging nature of all of this. The lessons Liv’s brain is trying to tell her is told to her several times, making her eventual acceptance of those lessons not necessarily feel like a big moment, more a dramatically inevitable one. The series is kind of stuck between a movie and something that needed serialization like this. It’s fairly simplistic – if relatable – ideas could’ve been boiled down to a heavy 2 hour movie. 6 episodes is pretty brief, but it still leaves too much room for this approach, which is also why the discrepancy between the survival-focus and the drama-focus is so notable, without either side of that getting enough depth to feel “worth it.”

Still, I was in it. I was in it while being aware of its flaws. And if you’re able to watch Keep Breathing without expecting it to dive headfirst into genre, Barrera’s performance, and the creator’s willingness to stick to their tone – if ultimately limiting – make for an engaging view.