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avevale_intelligencerThere have been some things on telly lately that promised much, and we dutifully gave them a fair chance. That I'm still finding more enjoyment in things that are rather more obviously genre fodder (The Mentalist, Medium, Ghost Whisperer) probably says more about me than it does about anything else. However.
Marchlands disappointed me on so many levels. For one thing it's a retread of something American; can't we even write our own ghost stories now? The story exuded daytime soap from every joint, along with a healthy slice of fifties morality; sex and drugs are Bad, but violence is Good, or at least manly. The resolution wasn't; even when we knew why what had happened had happened, we didn't actually find out what had happened. For all we know Alice could have been scrobbled by an unshaven Czechoslovakian haddock-sexer named Istvan and sold as a slave to a foreign potentate, or adopted by a tribe of stoats, or abducted by aliens, or anything. I suspect this may have been a vestigial urge on the part of the writers to leave a loophole for a sequel if this one sells well; vestigial, since such a thing would be nonsensical, as all the main characters' stories apart from Alice's are fairly neatly rounded off. It was well made, with a host of familiar faces all acting their hearts out (Anne Reid is always watchable), but the writing and the overall conception were a let-down.
Bedlam...well, it's Kingdom Hospital, isn't it, or possibly the original The Kingdom which I haven't seen. A collection of characters in a haunted building get frightened every week till the whole place falls down, or blows up, or gets exorcised, or something. Someone did something nasty and Troubled Ghost Boy has to find out what, and everything else in the meantime is just distraction. The impression I have, remembering it now, is of the same harsh, washed-out colour palette that made Ultraviolet the series so hard for me to want to watch: Brits desperately trying to be gritty and uncompromising and succeeding only in being unpleasant and offputting. Crooked House was better.
Being Human is odd. I keep getting the feeling it's trying to shake me off, as if I were one of those irritating people who latches on to you in the street, presuming on a slight prior acquaintance, and then persists in walking beside you and saying things like "this is nice, isn't it?" despite all your efforts to intimate without actually saying so that you would rather be alone. (Okay, maybe that was a little too on the nose there. I do not actually feel like that about anyone, and I hope they don't feel that way about me.) Over the preceding series I've actually managed to achieve a reasonable degree of sympathy with our trio of supernaturals, but this is obviously not what the writers want, because they keep trying to alienate me again. Not sure why. As for the spin-off, Becoming Human, I'm still waiting for something to happen.
I've got another post coming, so I'll leave this here.
Marchlands disappointed me on so many levels. For one thing it's a retread of something American; can't we even write our own ghost stories now? The story exuded daytime soap from every joint, along with a healthy slice of fifties morality; sex and drugs are Bad, but violence is Good, or at least manly. The resolution wasn't; even when we knew why what had happened had happened, we didn't actually find out what had happened. For all we know Alice could have been scrobbled by an unshaven Czechoslovakian haddock-sexer named Istvan and sold as a slave to a foreign potentate, or adopted by a tribe of stoats, or abducted by aliens, or anything. I suspect this may have been a vestigial urge on the part of the writers to leave a loophole for a sequel if this one sells well; vestigial, since such a thing would be nonsensical, as all the main characters' stories apart from Alice's are fairly neatly rounded off. It was well made, with a host of familiar faces all acting their hearts out (Anne Reid is always watchable), but the writing and the overall conception were a let-down.
Bedlam...well, it's Kingdom Hospital, isn't it, or possibly the original The Kingdom which I haven't seen. A collection of characters in a haunted building get frightened every week till the whole place falls down, or blows up, or gets exorcised, or something. Someone did something nasty and Troubled Ghost Boy has to find out what, and everything else in the meantime is just distraction. The impression I have, remembering it now, is of the same harsh, washed-out colour palette that made Ultraviolet the series so hard for me to want to watch: Brits desperately trying to be gritty and uncompromising and succeeding only in being unpleasant and offputting. Crooked House was better.
Being Human is odd. I keep getting the feeling it's trying to shake me off, as if I were one of those irritating people who latches on to you in the street, presuming on a slight prior acquaintance, and then persists in walking beside you and saying things like "this is nice, isn't it?" despite all your efforts to intimate without actually saying so that you would rather be alone. (Okay, maybe that was a little too on the nose there. I do not actually feel like that about anyone, and I hope they don't feel that way about me.) Over the preceding series I've actually managed to achieve a reasonable degree of sympathy with our trio of supernaturals, but this is obviously not what the writers want, because they keep trying to alienate me again. Not sure why. As for the spin-off, Becoming Human, I'm still waiting for something to happen.
I've got another post coming, so I'll leave this here.