‘Run’ on HBO: The sexy escape you didn’t know you needed

A good show can give you a high – like a runner’s high, but without having to exercise. (No pun intended.) A story which truly gets you invested will have you feeling the highs and lows of the characters, and a little adrenaline from a plot twist never hurts. It can be a great escape from your own life, if only momentarily.

However, your next bit of escapism may well be about two people literally escaping their everyday lives. Run on HBO is a thrilling, sexy, and well written series which will have you wanting more, which will be tough since season one only has seven episodes.

Plot

Run stars Merritt Wever (best known for her roles in Birdman and A Marriage Story) as Ruby Richardson, and Domhnall Gleeson of Star Wars fame as Billy Johnson. Ruby and Billy used to date, but have been estranged for years. One day Billy invokes an old plan of theirs by texting Ruby the word “RUN”.

The plan was simple: If ever one of them texted the other that single word, and the other one responded in kind, then they would both drop everything in their lives, meet at Grand Central Station and travel across the country together.

The show follows the two characters as they deal with the troubles of reuniting, their own secrets, and the difficulties of running from their lives.

Reception

The show currently has an average score of 83% on Rotten Tomatoes with viewers calling the show exciting, believable, wild, sexually charged, and even a little Hitchcockian.

Viewers also praise the thirty-minute format for this dark comedy/thriller as being an easy to consume format for the storyline.

There have been some nay-sayers of the show, as there always is. Those who took issue with the show felt as if the dialogue was awkward and the two leads had very little chemistry. However, there are a lot of people who would disagree with those statements, so you’ll have to decide this for yourself.

How to watch it

The show premiered its first episode on April 12th. Since then, six of the first season’s seven episodes have aired – so however you accessed HBO from your Game of Thrones days will work for Run, as well. And since the show’s episodes, as we mentioned, are only thirty minutes each, binging the show can be done in a single afternoon.

If you’re wanting to watch the whole series before the season finale so you can watch it live, then you have until Sunday, May 24th to do so. The seventh episode will be on HBO at 10:30pm.