My wife and I have watched some of each episode. I am a blues fan and she is not; neither one of us has been terribly happy with this series.

My wife was really looking forward to last night's episode ("Warming by the Devil's Fire") in particular, because she was intrigued by the sacred/profane storyline. However, 5 minutes into the show, she's asking me "Why are they showing this Son House footage *again*?"

After that, she became really bored with the narrative -- every time the kid and his uncle came on the screen, she wanted to flip over to The West Wing. The dialogue and acting She liked the archival footage -- especially of Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Bessie Smith -- but it was too few and far between. So much for appealing to a non-blues fanatic!

For myself, I enjoyed episodes #1 (Feel Like Going Home) and #3 (Road to Memphis) even though they suffered from too much talk and not enough music. But at least they were coherent stories told well.
Episodes #2 and #4 were simply awful IMHO. I got the distinct impression in Episode #2 that Wim Wenders does not know what he's talking about when it comes to blues music, and his focus on that Swedish couple was rather embarrasing ("they didn't like our film...because it was so bad"). Episode #4 was the most disappointing for me because it contained archival footage of a few of my heroes (like Mississippi John Hurt and Libba Cotten), but the narrative plot was long and lame.

Does all this make us "so damned picky", or does it mean we've retained our critical faculties? I prefer the latter, thank you. Yes, it's better than 90% of what's on television, but that's more a comment of what's on television than anything else. A few snippets of riveting performances by Son House, Muddy and the Wolf does not make up for hours and hours of poor storytelling IMHO.