An amusing game when watching bad television is to imagine how many performers passed on a role before the actual lead came on board. In the case of Kerry Washington and Apple TV’s Imperfect Women, my guess is that the list stretches to the dozens. 

Despite her limitations as a screen performer, the one-time star of ABC’s Scandal is not the worst thing about Apple’s new show. That designation belongs to the writers, who spend much of the eight-episode limited series displaying an odd unfamiliarity with the conventions of drama. Whole scenes and characters amount to nothing, blanks in a narrative gun. An early episode makes much of an ensemblist’s “pain” but never shows us an example, leaving viewers to flounder in abstraction. If, as seems increasingly clear, streaming services need murder-of-the-week programming simply to keep the lights on, the least they could do is make such shows with care. Imperfect Women represents instead the utter exhaustion of the genre. The series is thoughtless, boring, unsexy, and punishingly dumb.