Is It Just Me, or Has Virgin River's Acting Gotten Way Worse in Season 5?

When Virgin River premiered on Netflix in 2019, I was totally smitten with this cozy and feel-good show, because following LA nurse Mel as she moves to a small town of the same name to find love and acceptance just seemed impossible without falling in love with her. And while a lot of people can't stand melodrama, especially when it comes from Netflix, I and thousands of others loved the first season of the show to death, fully expecting to follow the lives of the residents of Virgin River for years to come.

And while the show continued for five seasons straight, with the last batch of episodes released less than two weeks ago, the quality of the show has certainly taken a huge hit since that great first installment, as the writing became totally predictable and made the show look more like a daytime soap opera.

The acting got much worse.

And even though the writers managed to fix the problems of the critically destroyed Season 4 and finally put some effort into making the ridiculous storylines look a bit more realistic, I can't say the same about the acting performances.

Don't get me wrong, I love and respect Alexandra Breckenridge, Martin Henderson and the rest of the cast, but the first part of Season 5 proved that the actors just don't care about the show anymore.

In the first two seasons it was clear that the cast were trying their best to make the show as good as possible, creating wonderful and detailed acting performances as normal everyday people, but in the last few seasons they seemed to be operating on autopilot, probably thinking more about the paychecks than the fans.

Even big and dramatic scenes like a huge forest fire that threatens the lives of all the inhabitants of Virgin River failed to evoke any kind of interesting emotion from the crew, and even the previously great Breckenridge and Henderson fell victim to bad acting, as every scene with them together looked like a caricature of their previous chemistry.

Sadly, it looks like even the two remaining episodes to be released on November 30th won't be able to fix this sudden drop in acting quality, as the actors are obviously tired of playing the same characters over and over again.