Kate Beckinsale is miscast in Guilty Party, yet her leading role in the Paramount+ dark comedy works

San Francisco Chronicle

Beckinsale is "a bad fit for her disgraced journalist character, Beth, in the new Paramount+ dark comedy Guilty Party," says Carla Meyer. "Yet her miscasting ends up working out just fine. Perfectly tailored and coiffed, her beachy waves arranged just so, Beckinsale looks like she helicoptered in from Aspen, or perhaps Malibu, into her Denver reporter character’s mud-covered Subaru and middle-class life. Beckinsale’s demeanor in Guilty Party, which premieres Thursday, Oct. 14, is that of someone being careful not to touch anything around her — including Beth’s oafish husband (Geoff Stults). Her American accent is iffy and her comic delivery stiff, reminding us it has been a lot of years — and blue-lit vampire action movies — since Beckinsale broke through with the delicious comedy Cold Comfort Farm. But this fish-out-of-water quality alchemizes with Beckinsale’s big-screen-size charisma into a highly watchable performance, as Guilty Party reveals how much Beth is also out of sorts."

ALSO:

• Guilty Party is a weird show: "Not in the sense that it’s showing us something strange or subversive, which it isn’t really, but in the sense that it’s hard to know what to make of it," says Angie Han. "The series is positively overflowing with themes and characters and story elements that it keeps hurtling at the wall, in hopes that something will stick. After watching the three half-hour episodes sent to critics (of a 10-episode season), I’m still waiting to see if anything does."
• Guilty Party just keeps giving in to Beth’s worse instincts without giving its audience any real reasons to care if she ever succeeds
• Guilty Party's problems start with the writing: Creator Rebecca Addelman's show is wildly inconsistent, and it's tough to find any humor in the central plot
• Newcomer Jules Latimer says she was intimidated landing her first on-screen role opposite Kate Beckinsale because "when I was a kid, I had a crush on her"