Virgin River's Biggest Fail? Wasting Screen Time on Something Nobody Cares About
The show struggles to stay engaging.
Since its 2019 premiere, Netflix's Virgin River has frequently been hailed as one of the best streaming melodramas, but that doesn't mean the series wasn't without its problems. While the central love story between Jack and Mel proved to be the biggest reason why fans stuck with the show for five straight seasons, the amount of screen time wasted on supporting characters and uninspiring subplots made fans question their loyalty to the show.
After all, the original Virgin River books were a hit for a reason – the series of novels is an easy read in the best sense of the word, with storylines resolved quickly and new characters constantly entering the picture. The adaptation, however, is nothing like the source material, as everything moves painfully slow in Netflix's version of Virgin River.
A wasted time
Consider that Charmaine was pregnant with her twins in the show's pilot episode, but she has yet to give birth in the first half of Season 5. Fans have had to wait almost four years to see Charmaine's children, and the writers are still postponing the finale to this boring storyline.
In addition, Jack and Mel's romance is also moving rather slowly, with them wasting so much time on unimportant things that it became a chore for the fandom to follow them in the last seasons of the show.
A change for the better
Fortunately, it looks like the writers realized their mistake before they started writing Season 5, and they picked up the pace quite a bit. The Wildfire storyline moved at a breakneck pace and helped some fans regain their faith in the show, even if the abysmally uninteresting storylines of Charmain and Preach kept them from praising the current episode as a return to form for Virgin River.
With only two episodes left in Season 5, fans are hoping to finally see Charmaine give birth and for the writers to finally fix their mistakes in adapting the original books so that future installments can move at a much faster pace.
The second half of Virgin River Season 5 will premiere on Netflix on November 30, 2023.