I guess reviews for the show are written by die-hard fans. Or maybe people now ready to eat-up whatever content, they can get, that looks good. I mean it, the show does look great. It gets post-apocalyptic aesthetics to the T, and is filled with little details that are capable to tell a story of their own. In a game this would be a real achievement, and it was: even though I never got into Fallout series, I can admit, that it had high detalization of the world through-out. At least in the main series games, that I did try.
But even for a game it's not enough: you need a good story, and good gameplay there, too. I never liked the gameplay part of the series, it just did not click with me unlike The Elder Scrolls, but TV shows don't need to bother with that. TV show creators' job is much easier then, right?
In my opinion, these TV show creators fail at their job. I often complain about series, that have too much talking without using visual to tell the story. This one is the reverse: there is too little of talking, or at least of talking that would develop character, world of move plot along. Some reviewers did notice this as well, pointing out, that it feels like screenwriters were writing for a game, and for TV.
If this was a short movie, this might have been fine, but for TV show - not so much. For me it was boring. Only the first part of the 1st episode was somewhat interesting to me. It was a cliche, but still a good starting point for a story: a sheltered society gets raided, and that forces a character (or characters) to go outside of that society and learn about the world. But then we switch to part of that outside world, and it's not as interesting.
It's not just Brotherhood of Steel, but the outside world in general. The creators are trying too hard to make it look "uncivilized" or "militaristic" or "sterile" or just "weird", and as result it all feels forced. As if they had a list of things to show, and they progressed through the story by checking items off that list.
At the least, I think they should have used just 1 main plotline with the girl leaving shelter. It could have become a travel-show with fish-out-of-the-water theme, and each episode could have explored all the weirdness of this strange world, while the girl was moving forward. You know, a bit like The 10th Kingdom back from 2000, but post-nuclear. Alas, we have what we have. As is, I would rather rewatch Silo. It was not a perfect show, but it was much more interesting to me.
