Television Review: The Vampire Diaries

I blame True Blood for getting me into The Vampire Diaries. My boyfriend needed a vampire fix in between the all too short seasons of True Blood, so we decided to add The Vampire Diaries to our watchlist. Though I carefully sidestepped the Twilight movies and have managed to avoid any amount of novels starring werewolves and vampires, I have ended up following ‘Dawson’s Creek with Fangs’, as some might call it. It is based on a series of books by L.J. Smith, which I will never read, and was developed into a series by Kevin Williamson, who also created the Creek series and wrote the first two Scream movies. His trademark is well-written peppy dialogue with a lot of wordplay and pop culture references. The episodes he writes himself do indeed feature that, though the average script for the series is noticeably less sharp.

Core of the series are Damon and Stefan Salvatore, brothers who were both turned into vampires in 1864 by the evil vixen Katherine, who happens to be the spitting image of Elena, a girl the siblings both meet and fall for in current day. There’s an explanation for Elena and Katherine looking the same, but let’s just say it’s complicated. (And let’s overlook the fact that the age difference between the Salvatores and their love interest is pretty damn creepy when you think about it.) This all happens in Mystic Falls, a town where the brothers own a mansion in which they lurk around moodily, from the first episode of the series onwards. There is a love triangle between the brothers and Elena, of course, and there is a lot of angst and romantic entanglement among the whole teenage (but really in their twenties) cast. At first the vampires seem to be the only ones out of whack in a fairly normal world, but soon there are witches, vampire hunters and rings that revive you if you die. Werewolves are also likely to put in a first appearance soon.

The series has two main narrative problems: the stakes seem low even when they are high (accidental pun there) and the series hasn’t figured out how to keep its main, popular bad guy around in a way that’s believable. To start with the first problem: those back-from-the-dead rings are a lazy narrative cheat, not to mention a somewhat silly one. In a recent episode, it was suggested that the reviving would only work if something or someone supernatural was involved in the wearer’s demise. So a vampire could twist your head around and you’d die for a bit and ultimately end up just fine, but if you’d trip and hit your head on a coffee table, you’d be toast. Apparently. A couple of times already, the writers have made a spectacle out of killing a main or regular character only to have them – ta-daa! – sit up with a jolt a couple of scenes later, none the worse for wear. That really takes the edge off the threat of mortality. Admittedly, some deaths in the series did take and some people stayed in the afterlife, but watching a death scene with the initial thought ‘Meh, maybe it won’t stick anyway.’ dulls the dramatic impact. Call it the ‘Comic Book Superhero Revolving Door of Death Syndrome’, as also seen on Heroes, where it was part of the decline of the series. The origin of these magic plot-device rings has not been revealed yet, but then the same goes for the rings the Salvatores wear to be able to walk around in daylight, thankfully not glittering Twilight-style as they do so. I wonder if an enigmatic mystic jeweler will soon be putting in an appearance.

The second problem is Damon (Ian Somerhalder), the cool, morally ambiguous and funny ‘bad’ Salvatore brother who gets all the best lines. There’s no doubt he is the most entertaining character and it’s clear he should be kept in the series, but he has done some fairly unforgivable things and been forgiven nonetheless. When one of the leads just mopes around for a couple of episodes when Damon kills (or at least tries to) one of their friends or relatives, you start to wonder why you as a viewer should care, since even the people on screen don’t seem to mind that much. The cast in general seems a bit too blasé about innocent bystanders falling by the wayside at least partly because of their own actions and the emotional impact of a life lost, doesn’t last much beyond a single episode. The good guys come off as irresponsible for letting a loose cannon like Damon run around and even go so far as to hang out with him in a semi-friendly way. The writers are pushing him out of the ‘bad’ zone and into a moral grey area lately, to make his prolonged presence believable, but he still takes the occasional detour across the ‘evil’ threshold. To make him too good would ruin the character, but somehow he needs to be forced into being a relatively good boy for the long term, against his more evil nature. Hey, it worked for Spike from Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, even if it took first sticking a chip into his brain that prevented him from hurting humans and then giving him his soul back. For The Vampire Diaries a witches’ curse might do the trick, as I think in this series vampires still have their soul.

Hopefully The Vampire Diaries will find a proper place for Damon and do away with cheap gimmicks that deflate the tension. The series is unlikely to stick in the mind after it’s all done and dusted years from now, but it makes for entertaining, if highly disposable, viewing.

Television Review: Medium (Seasons 1-6)

Medium is a guilty pleasure for me. Not because it is necessarily badly written or produced but because it is less edgy than the stuff I generally go for. To sum up the concept: psychic mom Allison Dubois (played by Patricia Arquette), her loving husband Joe and their three wholesome daughters deal with complications caused by mom’s gift, as she uses it to help Phoenix law enforcement solve crimes. In early episodes the emphasis was on the crimes, but over the course of six seasons the home front has been gaining more and more screen time. This is just as well, as the cases tend to be a bit formulaic and in Medium, home is really where the heart is.

Pretty much every episode starts with Allison waking up in a shock from a dream related to a crime past, present or future. Sometimes the dream is a simple fly-on-the wall observation of the act or of moments right before or after, but you can be sure you’re not being given the full picture. The perpetrator is rarely clear and the visions are often remarkably tricky and subjective, setting up a twist for the writers to pull out of their hat for the final act of the episode. It seems that Allison is meant to prevent further crime on the basis of the dreams, but the rules that govern them are confusing and inconsistent. It’s not really clear why the spirits don’t just spit out what’s on their mind but prefer to peel back the layers on their message bit by bit, in a series of dreams. Allison also sees the occasional ghost. These ghosts seem to know what’s coming up in the future from their vantage point, guiding or manipulating her one way or the other. Why these ghosts have it together more than the ones reaching out through her dreams is not explained. She also has the occasional vision when hearing someone talk or when holding an object. But this apparently happens only when a case would be dead in the water otherwise. In early seasons, it was stated that Allison’s power rarely - if ever - gave her insight into (or affected) people she knew personally, but as the focus of the series shifted to her family, so did her visions.

The more you watch Medium, the more you realize the modus operandi of the afterlife is molded to the needs of the plot of a specific episode. This makes the tension feel artificial, as you are aware you are being pretty blatantly manipulated by the writers. Additionally, once you have watched a bunch of episodes, you tend to get wise to what information is being distorted or left out early on. You’ll end up seeing the twist coming long before Allison does. Of course, the viewer has the unfair advantage of knowing Allison is in a television series, being moved through a plot, but figuring out the truth long before she does – time and time again - does make her seem a bit slow on the uptake.

Allison works on her cases with district attorney Manuel Devalos and detective Lee Scanlon. Neither of these characters is given a lot of depth or heart and mostly they serve to regurgitate plot points. Devalos is a straightforward, moral man who lost a daughter and truly loves his wife. Scanlon is a taciturn, rigid guy, with limited emotional range and commitment issues. Neither of them overflows with charm. They have odd lapses in skill, sometimes forgetting about fingerprints or DNA evidence which you realize – once it is revealed to you how a crime really happened – should have been found earlier on in the investigation.

The true fun is to be had with Allison’s husband Joe (played perfectly by Miguel Sandoval) and the three daughters, who are moving through their growing pains as the seasons roll by and are dealing with the psychic abilities they inherited from their mom. The eldest is sensitive and all about boys and make-up, the middle one is willful and goofy - more frogs and snails than sugar and spice – and the youngest one is quiet and shy (so far). Having kids on a show who are charming and funny without being obnoxious or precocious is a pretty rare occurrence and Medium has nailed it. My personal favorite is the middle child, though a friend of mine disagrees and gets irritated by the ‘funny’ one, so personal mileage may vary. Joe is also someone you care about, as he tackles his unusual home life with an entertaining and believable combination of pragmatism, humor and worry.

What makes the show work is the contrast of this charming, happy family with the big, bad outside world in which horrible crimes occur. In a sense, the writers hold the family hostage, constantly threatening to have something happen to one or more of its members. It is an empty threat, because they know it would destroy what works about the show if they carried through on it, but you still care because the characters are so damn involving. Occasionally the show can feel a bit static, because nothing really changes within the family as the crimes-of-the-week are solved and forgotten.

The creator of the show is Glenn Gordon Caron, who also created Moonlighting. There aren’t that many similarities between the series, but there is a feel for funny-but-realistic dialogue that carries over and a willingness to experiment playfully with the format of the show. Oddly, there is a ‘real’ Allison Dubois with a husband and three daughters, an alleged psychic on whom Caron based the series. She has written a couple of books about the role she played in solving various crimes, though the police denies having worked with her. This by itself doesn’t discredit her, as law enforcement can’t exactly go to a jury and admit their evidence was gathered by way of a psychic. But a lot of the stories she tells in the books were also discredited by regular people who were involved in them. She is somewhat aggressively dismissive of skeptics and has stated that the portrayal of her family in Medium gives a fairly good impression of her home life. If that is indeed the case and she does indeed have dreams and visions like the ones in the series, she might want to ask those in the great beyond to stop being so damn cryptic and give her something to undeniably prove her powers once and for all.

Television Review: Lost

Lost is about the survivors of a plane crash who end up on an island where all sorts of strange things happen. As the series goes on, we discover more about the twisty past of the large cast of characters through flashbacks and also - in the 'present' - about the nature of the island. Without spoiling too much: a violent creature roams the woods, people who couldn't possibly be on the island walk around there regardless and a shady corporation has been doing strange experiments there. More than one external force has it out for the survivors and even the island itself seems to have a plan for them, one possibly connected to 'karma'. Most of the drama plays out on a sunny beach or in a sumptuous tropical forest.
Lost is a series you get the most out of by starting from the very beginning, watching as pieces of a very elaborate puzzle start to interlock. The brains behind Lost - among whom creator J.J. Abrams of Alias and Cloverfield fame - are meticulous about drip-feeding just enough new information in each episode to keep you guessing and hungry for more. Considering that they clearly scoff at linear storytelling, it is ironic that all the episodes need to be seen in order to not get - well - lost. Where for the first two seasons or so the stories jumped between the 'present' on the island and the twisty past of the plentiful cast, by now there are also jumps into their future. It is to the writers' credit that you won't often get confused about where you are in the narrative. However, because of a lot of casually referenced back story, you might find yourself scratching your head regularly if you don't tune in every week.
The most regular complaint about Lost is a lack of forward momentum. Because of the trips into the past and several storylines running concurrently at most points, a cliff-hanger to one episode might stay unresolved until a couple of weeks later. Too many lingering reaction shots and a general unwillingness of everybody on the island to either ask an obvious, direct question or give a direct answer can also get on the nerves. Everybody is withholding information from everybody else for sometimes unbelievable reasons. It is an obvious way to extend some of the plotlines and to build tension.
I have to admit that I almost bailed on the series at the beginning of the third season, when the first ten episodes or so stalled: the writers just seemed to be milking for time. Luckily the series soon recovered with a clearer sense of purpose and I can't help but think that the writers' strike actually helped the abbreviated fourth season, with just fourteen episodes. The creators claim to have the whole story mapped out until the end of the series, the next two seasons supposedly wrapping it up. They were forced to speed up their storytelling to end the fourth season at the point they had originally planned, leading to some pleasantly compact episodes.
More and more answers are surfacing about the connections between all the strange things that have been happening in Lost. I am wondering if the next two seasons will be able to tie everything together satisfactorily. It could very well be that the final explanation will end up either being a bit silly or will create retroactive plot-holes. Not until the final reel is out there, will the viewers be able to judge how well the whole thing holds together. Though I generally admire the writing for Lost, the writers have messed up before a couple of times when it comes to believability. There was the foretold death of one of the regulars for instance, which was presented as heroic and necessary, but turned out to be completely avoidable and therefore stupid when the moment arrived. The island appears to be shrinking as the series goes on: by now it seems to take a lot less time to get from one side of it to the other than it did at the beginning of the series. Amazingly, people often tend to just happen to run into each other in the huge forest when the plot requires. And the non-featured survivors seem all too aware of their status as extra's and will pop up, disappear and sometimes die without having much of an impact on anyone. If you saw the season four finale (mild spoiler alert) ask yourself this: why wasn't anybody mobbing the helicopter and why weren't the main characters concerned about the well-being of the other survivors? Oh well, the occasional logical lapse notwithstanding, I will definitely be hanging around to watch the final lap. Here's hoping they don't lose the plot.

Television Review: Doctor Who

Doctor Who is a British television series about a Time Lord. This is an alien who looks totally human, but possesses two hearts and has the ability to regenerate into a different body - and therefore a different actor - when he is on the edge of death. There used to be a lot of Time Lords, but according to the current run of the television series, Doctor Who is the last survivor of a terrible battle with the Daleks, a murderous race of robot-aliens. He bounces around time and space, accompanied by one or two 'companions' at a time, in an unexpectedly roomy blue telephone box called the Tardis, averting disasters and saving the galaxy. I guess the telephone box was deemed nicely inconspicuous by the misguided soul who designed it. (Since I wrote that, I have been informed by more fanatic fans that this look is due to a malfunction of some computer gizmo or another, which the doctor has been unable to fix.)
The regeneration aspect is a handy one for the producers behind the series. If the actor who plays Doctor Who wants to bow out, the character can be mortally wounded and regenerate. This actually happened after the first series in the new incarnation, when Christopher Eccleston decided to leave, causing 'his' Doctor to morph into David Tennant. (Tennant is still going strong and wildly popular, so don't expect him to change again soon if the producers get their way.) What adds to the fun is that the Doctor's personality is allowed to change slightly to suit the new actor. While in other series it would be a headache to have the lead leave, for Doctor Who it just allows a new dynamic and new stories.
Doctor Who was off the air for a long time, originally running from 1963 until 1989. It was revived in 2005 by Russell T. Davies of Queer as Folk fame to success beyond all expectations. The fan base of the sci-fi series rivals that of Star Trek in their fanaticism, so it was quite an achievement that Russell managed to placate both them and hook a new generation of viewers. I think he played fast and loose with some of the continuity of the previous series, but I can't be sure as there is too much material in the form of novels, radio-plays and episodes for me to wade through.
The set-up of Doctor Who allows near unlimited potential for telling stories: all of time and space are the playing ground. Believability is an issue, as the butterfly effect (small changes have major consequences) gets even more confusing when continuously jumping around in time. The current Doctor Who philosophy is that there are 'fixed' points in time, which have to remain unaltered and other points when things are more flexible and you can safely muck around a little. I am not sure how that would work temporally speaking, but mostly this logic is fitted to suit the scripts. Davies' take on the stories is one of high adventure and big emotions, done with such infectious enthusiasm that you happily suspend disbelief. Granted, especially in the episodes he wrote himself, he really makes you work for that suspension. Major problems are solved or can't be solved because of obscure bits of technobabble, just to set up cool scenes. The rules of what can happen and what can't are often not very clear. When the resulting scenes are indeed cool enough, you won't care but sometimes when they're not, you end up rolling your eyes.
One of the biggest changes Davies made to the original concept was giving the people who join Doctor Who on his travels a background and families to deal with. Previously these 'companions' mostly served as sounding boards - so the doctor wouldn't just talk to himself - or as people to be saved. They would ride along until they started to feel old and then be written out in one quick way or another. The 'new' Doctor has already gone through three companions in the current run, each one giving the stories a new spin. With Rose Tyler (Billie Piper) there was a mutual attraction - a first in Doctor Who history, I believe - Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman) crushed on the Doctor and Donna Noble (comedienne Catherine Tate) humorously clashed with him, as an equal. The way in which these companions were written out of the series - for the time being anyway - shows a definite strength of Davies: a great balance of bitter and sweet. There may be despair sometimes in the Doctor Who reality, but there is always hope. The hope sometimes veers into sappy territory, but then it is supposed to be an upbeat series also aimed at youngsters.
The aliens look silly enough to remind you of this target audience. Whether they bring to mind spiders or rhino's or Mr. Potato Heads, the ET's always look like they needed a slightly bigger special effects budget. But at least the producers have the guts to get creative and stray from the humanoid form occasionally. The Daleks - deadly robots with a little alien inside - have traditionally been the most popular of enemies for Doctor Who, but I have never understood why. On the surface they look cool enough - to sell toys anyway - but as killer robots go, they seem awkward and restricted in their movements. When I see their big spaceships and lairs I can't help but wonder who did the construction on it, as they only seem to sport one spindly little gripper in front and something that looks like a toilet plunger.

In the recently aired and somewhat overstuffed finale to the fourth season, Davies wraps pretty much all of his ongoing storylines into a big bow. He will be around for four Doctor Who specials, which will be airing throughout 2009, before leaving the series. I wonder if he will be starting any new mythology or if he will make the specials self-contained, to give his successor Steven Moffat a fresh start. Moffat penned some of the most popular episodes of the new series and he previously created the UK version of the comedy series Coupling, which had some very inventive storytelling. I will be curious to see in which direction he takes the franchise. The next episode to air will be a Christmas special in December. Before then, do yourself a favour and catch up on the 2005-and-beyond run of the series, even if you didn't like the older episodes. If not for you, then do it for your inner child.

Television Review: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

I love time travel stories, even though they generally drive me nuts. The first Terminator movie made fictional sense: something bad came out of the future and this future could not be avoided because - in a sense - it had already happened. When they apparently DID avoid this future at the end of the second movie, the logical thing to happen would have been a total reboot: Sarah back at the diner as a waitress. No Terminators, no son, no nothing. Because those events in the two movies ultimately wouldn't have happened and had been undone, you see? Back to the Future showed this effect at work, Michael J. Fox slowly fading out (though you'd think it would be more like an instant *plop*) when he messed with his past / his parents' future. But that trilogy threatens to make me go off on a long ramble about the butterfly effect, so let's get back to the Terminator saga.
By the third movie, the human-machine war starts - and it seems to be at the forefront of an upcoming new movie trilogy of the franchise. But now we also have the television series, which must be an alternate reality, as Sarah Connor sidesteps her death - as mentioned in the movies - by a jump from our recent past into present day. She is helped by a reprogrammed Terminator, who looks like a sweet girl. This machine is driven by curiosity and cold reasoning, fascinated by human behaviour while letting nothing keep her off her goal of protecting John Connor, the future leader of the rebellion. The fembot is played very well by Summer Glau, who previously showed off her kookiness in Firefly and in this role gets to kick quite a bit of ass. John and Sarah Connor unfortunately aren't all that interesting so far. Sarah is strong and stoic, but lacks charm, while James seems more a surly teen than a potential leader. Their main goal in the series is still to avoid the war which already became a reality in the movies.
There is a fair amount of 'reinterpretation' of Terminator lore here: where it once seemed there were only two models of Terminators - both made in large quantities - there are now a lot of them with different faces. On top of that, I think the first movie stated that only one man and one machine could be sent back in time. The second movie already messed with that statement and this series throws it completely out of the window: multiple machines and multiple humans travel back in time to suit the plot. This makes for major cause-and-effect headaches, such as: doesn't messing with the past on this scale change the future in itself, especially considering the previously mentioned butterfly effect (meaning: any minor change will have major consequences)? And if the Terminators didn't find themselves blinked out of existence after sending the first machine back, why send a second one? Didn't Sarah obviously fail to avoid the war? And why does Sarah want to avoid that future even though it likely means that her son will cease to be? Alternatively, in the case that changing the past doesn't erase the future but results in the creation of an alternate timeline, why bother going after someone in the past who can't affect 'your' reality? Is your head hurting yet?Apart from the special effects budget, I have to wonder why the improved, liquid metal Terminator model has not shown up yet. Is the future saving him as a last resort? And why wouldn't the last resort be sent back to an earlier point in time, as you don't have to be linear when time-travelling? It is somewhat worrying that all this shaky logic is at the core of the plot, but not being discussed. Maybe the show-runners are just stalling to be able to come up with a coherent explanation. The only way to enjoy the series is to let go of all reasoning, just watch the action and not ponder any of it. As it stands, Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles serves as a run-of-the-mill action series with average writing that will need to find a way to stand out from the competition, aside from its affiliation with the Terminator franchise.

Television Review: Ugly Betty

Thanks to a bout of flue I recently watched all of the first season of Ugly Betty as a marathon. This is the USA version of a concept that has been travelling the globe in many local forms. It was called 'Lotte' in the Netherlands and originally started out as 'Yo soy Betty, la Fea' (I am Betty, the Ugly One), a Columbian 'telenovella'. And my God, it is gay! By which I mean good gay, not derogatory teen speak gay. The central plot concerns an ugly duckling who gets a job at a fashion magazine called 'Mode'. Well, actually America Ferrara (the actress) looks pretty cute without her Betty gear, but for the series she has been saddled with braces, glasses, big eyebrows, layers of unwieldy hair and an unflattering wardrobe. One thing that is never quite explained is how someone who is such a major fan of Mode magazine (as she says in the first episode) can have such a bad fashion sense. It also seems unlikely that she wouldn't ask for a make-over by her friend - the in-house 'seamstress' at Mode - but it would go against the central theme of the series: stay true to yourself.
She is hired for the wrong reasons but wins her boss over with her honesty and pureness of heart. Yes, really. Soon she is swept up in drama on several fronts; the ones within her own family (Suarez) and the ones within the magazine and - by extension - the Mead family, who owns the magazine. While the usual soap-opera scheming goes on around her, with lies, betrayals and regrets flying around and hurting people who should know better, she faces the temptation to join in the fray, and sometimes has to, but gets busy most of the time with damage-control. Even the people who don't like her can't help but secretly admiring her a bit. She always ends up doing the right and moral thing.
Ugly Betty is a classy, intricately designed production. Though the moral involves style frequently clashing with substance, there is no lack of the former. The series makes fun of its own lowly telenovella roots by showing snippets of an amazingly cheesy television soap that the Suarez family likes to watch. Honestly though, the happenings in the 'real' series are often just as farfetched. The characters are as colourful as the sets, thankfully, and are played to the hilt by a very capable cast. Rebecca Romijn turns out to make a fantastic transsexual and Vanessa Williams can play a great evil, scheming bitch (as we knew she could). Special mention for the delightfully flaming Michael Urie as Marc, who shines as both the sardonic flunky of the Williams character and as BBFF (Bitchy Best Friends Forever) with ditzy blonde Amanda (Becki Newton). I might as well add Betty's young nephew to the list (played by Mark Indelicato) who seems to be a budding gay teen, and is accepted without question by his family. Pretty much all the characters are memorable and given enough room to be sympathetic - even the evil ones - as well as multi-layered.
I just started watching the second season and my only fear is that the series won't be able to top itself. If it starts inflating the drama and the characters to out-do the first season, it might end up só much over the top that the audience will stop relating to it. Added to that, some of the scheming is starting to feel repetitive already, as is the drama within the Mead family. And Betty now either needs to finally hook up with that accountant of her dreams or move on, it has been dragged out for long enough.
Still, any show that has this much charm to spare and this many great one-liners will have me clinging on for as long as possible. As Betty would no doubt tell us: hope springs eternal.

Television Review: Prison Break

*contains mild spoilers*

After two seasons, my love affair with Prison Break is over. What went wrong? *Wavy flashback effect* I came on board to this series rather late. I saw season one after it had already aired, in a couple of big chunks. The concept sounded interesting: Michael Scofield gets himself thrown into prison, with an elaborate plan to break out his soon to-be-executed brother. Now, there are plenty of movies about people breaking out of prison - The Great Escape with Steve McQueen perhaps being the most famous one - but spreading such a plan out over 22 episodes was a bit risky, as the actual break would obviously not happen until the end of the season and interest could easily be lost. However, the series was well-shot, well-produced and capably stringed the viewer along from one suspenseful setback in the plan to the next, slowly unveiling said plan, as tattooed (!) in code on Michael's body... Believable it was not even remotely, but though the main story progressed slowly, it successfully reeled you in with a sense of urgency that never let up.
Season two was about the now-escaped group of prisoners and a big government conspiracy. I was afraid that the concept would be stretched beyond breaking point and in regards to the conspiracy, it almost was. The same sense of urgency saved it, however. They did step wrong in the first episode by carelessly tossing aside a main character from season one and then not following through on the emotional impact that it should have had on the rest of the cast. It was the first sign that the writers had more feel for tension than for tracking the audience's emotional investment. By reshooting about a third of the last episode, these two seasons could have been satisfyingly wrapped up with a fairly happy ending. But no...
The creative minds behind the series said they had always planned for three seasons. But if the viewing figures hold up, I have no doubt they will find sudden inspiration for a fourth one as well. In the third season, Michael has to break out of a prison again, only this time not a tightly organised American one, but a Colombian survival-of-the-fittest nightmare ruled by a druglord. The way Michael gets put in there is very contrived, as is the way a surprising amount of cast-members end up in that same prison. The writers seem to be desperately trying to sledgehammer the old cast into this new-but-not-quite scenario. Adding insult to injury, they ditch the one cast-member who was necessary to give Michael the happy ending he - and the audience - had deserved in spades by now. With little promise of an emotionally satisfying pay-off and re-treading the same ground with a not big enough twist, I don't see how the show will recuperate. The 'one step forward, two steps back' approach irritates now that there seems nowhere worthwhile to get to.
As my boyfriend is still hooked on this series, I will probably have to stick around and watch it for a while longer. But I hope that this sentence and this series will soon come to a long overdue end.

Television Review: Eureka

Eureka has just been renewed for a third season by the SciFi Channel. The series once badly titled 'A Town Called Eureka' seems to be hitting its stride. The set-up: a U.S. Marshal (Colin Ferguson) gets stranded with his 'delinquent' daughter in a town with an unusual amount of geniuses. All these people are left to roam free, invent things, blow stuff up and generally mess with reality and the laws of physics. There is also a government-run research company called Global Dynamics guiding these oddballs, which might have semi-nefarious purposes. By the end of the pilot, the Marshal becomes Eureka's Sheriff and starts making this place his home.
I wasn't sure about the series on the basis of that first episode. The tone seemed off, some light and humorous aspects clashing with dark X-filesesque undertones. And the characters didn't really feel connected to each other. They fixed this somewhat in the rest of the series by ditching Greg Germann ('Fish' from Ally McBeal) and replacing him with the dashing Ed Quinn as the boss of Global Dynamics. In doing this, they also set up a classic Romantic Triangle at the heart of the series: the sheriff falls for his government liaison, who is married to (but separated from) her new boss (Quinn).
Eureka tries too hard to be cute and goofy sometimes, channelling Northern Exposure, Twin Peaks and those 'special' humorous episodes of the X-Files. But the cast meshes very well after a few episodes, great one-liners fly by with charming regularity and it doesn't make the mistake of taking itself too seriously. Sometimes, it even goes too far in this aspect: situations that should be fraught with tension don't actually get tense because the characters don't seem too anxious about yet another calamity threatening the town and the world. And when someone dies, though we are happily shown a charred or mangled (part of) a corpse, there isn't much dwelling on the person who just died even though this is supposed to be a small town where most people know each other. This insistence on keeping things light can throw you out of the show sometimes: if the artificial intelligence in your high tech house went haywire, took you hostage and killed someone, would you keep living there unless the thing was rebuilt from the ground up? Also, the amazingly blue-eyed Sheriff is very funny and likeable, but comes off as a bit - well - bumbling, being surrounded by all these brainiacs. The reason he often ends up saving the day is generally because the scriptwriters let him. It is hard to imagine him as the hardcore U.S. Marshal he was supposed to be, before he came to Eureka.
But regardless of the occasional misguided storyline (no more May-December sexy romances for Max Headroom please) or sappy plot resolutions, this town is well worth tuning into.

Television Rant

All Good Things Should Come to a Great End

Telling the story you want to tell in television can be a tricky process. Babylon 5 famously had a pre-planned five year story arc. When it came to the execution however, the ball was fumbled. When the fourth season was nearing completion, the series looked in serious danger of getting cancelled. So a 'final' episode was filmed, but then shifted to the end of the fifth season when - surprise - the series got renewed after all. Having very little production time on this last season, the quality dropped.

Spanners also get thrown into the wheels of the plot when an actor suddenly drops out for whatever reason or when an actrice gets pregnant. The writers have to work around the inconveniences real life deals them. Season endings can be particularly annoying: the creators of a lot of series try to lure you back to the next season by ending the last show on a cliffhanger. All fine and dandy, but that is very frustrating when said series does not end up having a next season. It is the zappers equivalent of getting to a really exciting part in a book and suddenly finding that all the remaining pages are blank.

Both the producers of television series and the American networks are to blame for this viewer-unfriendly work process. The networks often don't give a new series time to find an audience. They promote the hell out of it before it airs, then pull the plug when it doesn't score within a few weeks, betraying and angering the audience it was starting to build up. The producers - for their part - should realise that things might not work out the way they want it to and wrap things up fairly well season by season, rather than leave viewers hanging. Buffy the Vampire Slayer pulled this off, with a different main story arc for each season. It also makes good sense considering the ever-growing afterlife for series on DVD. A story without an ending is harder to sell. Graphic novels are starting to outsell comics for that very reason: people like their stories serialised, but in manageable nuggets and without a life-long commitment.

Getting rid of those season-ending cliffhangers will be difficult for a fairly twisted reason though: a sense of self-preservation among the producers. They seem to figure that a frustrating ending will whip the fans into action and might result in more episodes being shot - or even a complete next season. When Farscape ended with its two main leads apparently dead, it was through the loud protesting of fans that a three-hour miniseries was made to wrap things up neatly. And when Jericho was recently cancelled, the clamouring of fans led the network to decide to shoot seven additional episodes, with a view to renewing.

I think there should be a clause in the contract for any series: should it get cancelled, the crew should automatically get the budget to film an additional two or three episodes, with the intent of finishing the story. And if the networks have cold feet about new series, they should air shorter first seasons (let's say twelve-or-so episodes) that have a sense of completion to them. Daybreak had a thirteen episode run and got cancelled, but only left one or two plot-points hanging. It should be said that even these could have been removed by snipping out one or two shots (adding up to maybe thirty seconds in total) when it became clear that the series would not be renewed.

The fans for their part should gain some sense and realise that too much of a good thing can lead to that good thing becoming a bad thing. Series like Ally McBeal and many others made you wish for it to be retroactively axed a season or two before it actually was. It is better to have a loved series die while you still love it, than for it to keep hanging around until you just want the damn thing to DIE already. It feels like a slap in the face, when you invested so much time in a series, only to slowly watch it turn to crap and end on a bum note. Sometimes I can feel happy to know that a beloved series is ending. The coming season will be Battlestar Galactica's last, the producers have decided. This is a conscious creative decision, and it means they can go for broke with the story. Hopefully this will lead to a spectacular and fitting end and other series will follow suit.

But still - occasionally - I feel like a series has ended before its time. Yes, Veronica Mars, I am talking to you. It took a couple of episodes to get into it, but I loved the first season. The second series was a bit convoluted, but still worked and even the third season, though more uneven, was consistently entertaining. Truth be told - I could just could not get enough of the never-depleting supply of sass that Kristine Bell kept serving up. And she left our screens without that firm sense of resolution I have been talking about here. Bummer.