Who is Erin Carter Review: Evin Ahmad’s Action Thriller is Okay at Best

Who is Erin Carter Review: Starring Evin Ahmad as the titular character, Sean Teale as Jordi – her husband, Indica Watson as Harper – Erin and Jordi’s 10-year-old daughter, Pep Ambros as police detective Emilio Martin, Susannah Fielding as Erin’s friend and the school administrator, Olivia, and Douglas Henshall as Daniel Lang in main roles, the new Netflix limited series has been set in Barcelona. The series has been created by Jack Lothian.

Releasing on August 24, 2023, the action thriller series has 7 episodes, each with a runtime ranging between 44-54 minutes. Ahmad leads the show as the eponymous character, a British expat schoolteacher, now having moved to Barcelona, leaving her mysterious past behind, or so she thought, at least.

Who is Erin Carter Review Contains Spoilers

Who is Erin Carter Review: Discussion

Settled in the picturesque life of Barcelona’s environs, Erin’s life takes a jolting turn when she discovers a group of gunmen hijacking a local grocery store. Just as fears about her daughter getting hurt through this altercation kick in, her super instincts and badass reflexes take over the situation and have one of the bad guys on his back while she uses whatever is at her disposal in “self-defence”.

Soon after, she’s raised to the status of a local hero, while trying to convince the people around her that it was only her motherly instincts that saved the day. But she can only keep lying to herself for so long, especially since the supermarket exchange coincidentally brings her face to face with an old face from her past life kept under wraps so far.

Her life as a substitute school teacher wanting to make a difference in those kids’ lives who’re having it hard (much like her childhood, as she divulges eventually), and as a wife, and a mother desperately sparring to make way for a better life for her daughter is significantly disturbed after all this. Luckily, she’s got a friend in Pep Ambros’ Emilio, who also happens to be a cop, and helps keep her story clean, but in exchange, also gets her to look out for him through all the dangerous mess that he has to go through while busting drug deals and whatnot.

The first episode of the show picks up pace instantly. And with a lot happening in the pilot, the audience is likely to get pulled into the engrossing action-filled mystery at hand. Having Evin lead the show is another plus, given her track record of playing the protagonist in such gritty shows beforehand. But is merely the look of her as the face of the series enough to get us interested? The trailer definitely got my eyes peeled, hoping for something big and meatier, but after having watched the 7-part series, I can’t exactly say that my expectations have been met with flying colours.

All episodes seem to be evenly paced with an old-school approach guiding it in the direction of familiar elements that has the characters going undercover, playing two sides to get leads, stealing cop cars, further resulting in car chase sequences, jumping off buildings, engaging in hand-to-hand combats and more, especially with a lot of coincidences pushing the plot ahead.

One of the greatest aspects of it all is that the show essentially moves away from the jacked up vision of CGI-defined action universes, and such tenacious confrontations add a more personal touch to the action. However, it didn’t take long for me to see that the action become everything in this series, in turn defined by formulaic cliches.

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Ultimately forgetting the humane growth of its main characters, the show ditches them. Evin’s portrayal hoped to have tapped into a more human side of the classic thriller protagonist, and it even relied on her emotionality of wanting to look out for her daughter, thus, not throwing out feminine quirks of herself completely out the window either. However, the switch between her present and the past arose as a jarring transition at times, and the same also rendered her journey unemotional despite all her trauma and the stakes involved.

What’s even more astonishing is that prior to the whole supermarket upheaval, nothing about her past life ever seemed to have come up. One of the best connections of the show has to be the one shared between Erin and Harper, which is exactly what she’s been fighting for as well, but even that isn’t credited with enough screen time.

What actually gets that attention instead is Erin discovering her neighbour engaging in a physical relationship outside of her marriage, living in a suburban Barcelona setting of course. The first few episodes spend some unworthy amount of time to build up on this image with a Big Little Lies tone that was quite unnecessary for a show like this. Furthermore, the mystery surrounding the overall theme is merely tepid, and not enough for us to immerse into it fully.

Both Emilio and Olivia appear to be interestingly complex supporting characters, but neither of them are accorded with the respect that should be due to them. Even Evin’s Carter herself is a worthy antihero with an old-school flair about her, yet somehow, especially after having seen the actor’s work in the Swedish noir series Snabba Cash, this illustration appears to be a bit of a let-down. Henshall’s antagonist (spolier) could’ve also been something greater, but again, he’s not left off with enough time to balance his bad guy conscience with his fatherly concern.

Who is Erin Carter Netflix Series: Final Thoughts

Unfortunately, this is yet another addition to the okay-ish introduction of Netflix thrillers this year that doesn’t have anything novel to say. Its fall is measured in terms of how the show picks up the imagery of bloody noses and action itself as its focus while pushing its characters and their emotional growth and stories to the back.

Although it isn’t always bad for action to become the protagonist itself (the Bloodhounds K-drama achieved that successfully), but it should never be done at the cost of making your own protagonists seem like frigid action figures only. The show can be an average passing watch if you want to dig into action and some sense of familial bonds that come with it, but personally I’d just hoped for it be something more.

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