It's hard buying Idris Elba as a sad-sack loser on Netflix's Turn Up Charlie

The Ringer

As Rob Harvilla explains, Elba is "a full-blown movie star who somehow still radiates limitless up-and-comer potential; he feels both ubiquitous and brazenly undervalued. Stars with half his profile often feel 10 times as overexposed. Consequently, one major problem with Turn Up Charlie is that it’s awfully hard to buy him as, well, Charlie, a washed-up London DJ reduced to taking a gig as a nanny....Elba’s semicomedic sad-sack routine is such that you spend most of this eight-episode series just assuming he gained at least a little weight to take on a character-appropriate paunch, until he spends most of the last two episodes shirtless in Ibiza, where it is revealed that no, he did not."

ALSO:

• Turn Up Charlie feels so calculated: "The show’s vanity project aspirations frequently clash with some of its individual aims"
• Turn Up Charlie is a hard show to hate with Elba the best thing about it, but it too often dips into Disney Channel levels of saccharine
• Elba is delightful in a comedic turn that we haven't seen from him since The Office
• Elba is just not funny: "Elba’s considerable skills in projecting menace and resolve don’t come into play and he mostly just looks genial and a little lost"
• Over its eight episodes, Turn Up Charlie keeps indulging its clumsier instincts
• Not even Turn Up Charlie can totally kill Elba’s natural charisma by bludgeoning it to death with a turntable
• Idris Elba wanted to make a show about DJs, but added the parenting angle because there weren't enough storylines