Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic“Cruel Summer” has set up an intriguing challenge for itself. Each episode of the new Freeform drama series depicts a single day over the course of three years — 1993, 1994 and 1995 — in order to convey the long-tail effects of a kidnapping.
It’s both an attention-getting gambit and a limitation: Condensing a story that takes place over two years into three days of action, and finding ways to communicate what happened between the days we see without resorting to pure data-dumps.While it’s sometimes slightly inelegant, “Cruel Summer” generally manages to pull off that challenge in its first two episodes.
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