on TV worth watching
Apr. 15th, 2012 01:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xparrotJust finished up with a couple seasons' of sf/f shows that you may have missed! Neither are perfect or amazing television, but they both bring something that the genre could use more of.
Show: Terra Nova
The idea: Humans from a dying future earth go back in time to 85 million years BC (with the help of a convenient alternate-stream time rift to prevent unmaking-one's-own-existence paradox shenanigans) to start a colony that may be humanity's only hope for survival.
The low-down: This is paint-by-the-numbers old-school scifi. Several of the plots were lifted wholesale from Star Trek (TNG and TOS) and I could call their resolution within the first 5 minutes of the ep. The chars are cookie-cutter (even if Commander Taylor is made of badass), and there are some weird race issues (namely every single named male char I can remember was white - even the main teenage boy who should be mixed-race but whose actor obviously wasn't. While technically possible, I don't know why they couldn't have at least cast a brown-eyed actor? Especially when his sisters did look mixed - just weird, that.)
Also, while the show has an evidently enormous budget and the Australian scenery is gorgeous, most of the dinosaur CGI is pretty lousy.
Why it's worth watching anyway: This is classic old-school scifi, just as I've been missing on TV! The lone colony of brave individuals struggling to survive on the edge of the unknown will always be a button for me. Plus, adorable married couple! The main characters are a happily married cop and doctor with three teenage kids. While the chars themselves aren't original, their relationship is something I've almost never seen done in the genre, not since practically its beginning. It's Lost in Space in the Cretaceous, and I loved it.
Also, bad CGI or not - dinosaurs!!! Terra Nova is one of the few shows to provide one's minimum daily allowance of dinosaurs. And no paleontology errors egregious enough to have me banging my head against things.
The show is over for now - it had one short season last fall before Fox dropped it, mostly due to the huge budget. They're shopping it elsewhere now and I'm hoping it might get picked up, because it's the kind of show that could definitely develop into something interesting. Even if it doesn't get the chance, however, the first season is a complete enough story to be entertaining on its own, and the finale struck a good balance between leaving threads for future stories and offering enough resolution to satisfy.
Show: Lost Girl
The idea: A young succubus discovers what she really is and is inducted into the wild and wacky world of the Fae, often to her dismay.
The low-down: I've mentioned this show already. Just finished with the 2nd season (with the 3rd to come) and my original opinions still stand.
Firstly, to make it clear, despite the succubus heroine, this isn't actually urban fantasy softcore porn; in tone it's closer to early Buffy than True Blood. And the show is pretty careful in how it handles said heroine, due largely to a female creator who is aware of what she's doing and the potential problems (Just reading this interview with her doubled my enjoyment - minor spoilers for s1, but nothing major, so worth a read if you're curious.)
It's not perfect by any means. It's not as equal-opportunity with the sex and relationships as one might like (there's m/f and f/f but no m/m to speak of). The writing and acting are serviceable - the main star is the weakest actor among them, sometimes to the show's detriment; I get the feeling that the writers would give her more to do if she could actually handle it. (She's not the worst I've ever seen, but, yeah...she reminds me of Jared Padalecki, in that her physical acting is decent, but she struggles to pull off convincing line readings.) Also while the f/x are low-budget but decently well-managed, the action is often bad - their fight choreographer really should go back to catering. It spoils the tension of the finales.
Why it's worth watching anyway:The stories are fun, the characters are likable, and they do neat stuff with the Fae. Since the majority of the cast is fae, they avoid the Supernatural trap of all supernatural things being evil monsters. While there are Dark fae and Light fae, they don't map clearly to good or evil, and though a lot of them on either side are not very nice (especially from the human perspective) their motivations and behavior come in all shades of gray.
My favorite part, however, is while there is a lot of sex and romance, the core relationship of the show is the platonic friendship between the succubus and her human sidekick/roommate/BFF. It helps that Kenzi is by far the best thing about the show, but even if she wasn't amazing, I'd love it anyway for having such an awesome f-f friendship. They work together and tease each other and give advice and cuddle for comfort and the last finale did this great thing that showed that when it comes down to the wire, of all of Bo's friends and lovers, Kenzi is the one who is mostly solidly in her corner. The only genre show that I know of with anything comparable is Xena, and while I'm not saying Lost Girl is Xena (Anna Silk is no Lucy Lawless (who is?!)) it's still worth watching just for that.
Show: Terra Nova
The idea: Humans from a dying future earth go back in time to 85 million years BC (with the help of a convenient alternate-stream time rift to prevent unmaking-one's-own-existence paradox shenanigans) to start a colony that may be humanity's only hope for survival.
The low-down: This is paint-by-the-numbers old-school scifi. Several of the plots were lifted wholesale from Star Trek (TNG and TOS) and I could call their resolution within the first 5 minutes of the ep. The chars are cookie-cutter (even if Commander Taylor is made of badass), and there are some weird race issues (namely every single named male char I can remember was white - even the main teenage boy who should be mixed-race but whose actor obviously wasn't. While technically possible, I don't know why they couldn't have at least cast a brown-eyed actor? Especially when his sisters did look mixed - just weird, that.)
Also, while the show has an evidently enormous budget and the Australian scenery is gorgeous, most of the dinosaur CGI is pretty lousy.
Why it's worth watching anyway: This is classic old-school scifi, just as I've been missing on TV! The lone colony of brave individuals struggling to survive on the edge of the unknown will always be a button for me. Plus, adorable married couple! The main characters are a happily married cop and doctor with three teenage kids. While the chars themselves aren't original, their relationship is something I've almost never seen done in the genre, not since practically its beginning. It's Lost in Space in the Cretaceous, and I loved it.
Also, bad CGI or not - dinosaurs!!! Terra Nova is one of the few shows to provide one's minimum daily allowance of dinosaurs. And no paleontology errors egregious enough to have me banging my head against things.
The show is over for now - it had one short season last fall before Fox dropped it, mostly due to the huge budget. They're shopping it elsewhere now and I'm hoping it might get picked up, because it's the kind of show that could definitely develop into something interesting. Even if it doesn't get the chance, however, the first season is a complete enough story to be entertaining on its own, and the finale struck a good balance between leaving threads for future stories and offering enough resolution to satisfy.
Show: Lost Girl
The idea: A young succubus discovers what she really is and is inducted into the wild and wacky world of the Fae, often to her dismay.
The low-down: I've mentioned this show already. Just finished with the 2nd season (with the 3rd to come) and my original opinions still stand.
Firstly, to make it clear, despite the succubus heroine, this isn't actually urban fantasy softcore porn; in tone it's closer to early Buffy than True Blood. And the show is pretty careful in how it handles said heroine, due largely to a female creator who is aware of what she's doing and the potential problems (Just reading this interview with her doubled my enjoyment - minor spoilers for s1, but nothing major, so worth a read if you're curious.)
It's not perfect by any means. It's not as equal-opportunity with the sex and relationships as one might like (there's m/f and f/f but no m/m to speak of). The writing and acting are serviceable - the main star is the weakest actor among them, sometimes to the show's detriment; I get the feeling that the writers would give her more to do if she could actually handle it. (She's not the worst I've ever seen, but, yeah...she reminds me of Jared Padalecki, in that her physical acting is decent, but she struggles to pull off convincing line readings.) Also while the f/x are low-budget but decently well-managed, the action is often bad - their fight choreographer really should go back to catering. It spoils the tension of the finales.
Why it's worth watching anyway:The stories are fun, the characters are likable, and they do neat stuff with the Fae. Since the majority of the cast is fae, they avoid the Supernatural trap of all supernatural things being evil monsters. While there are Dark fae and Light fae, they don't map clearly to good or evil, and though a lot of them on either side are not very nice (especially from the human perspective) their motivations and behavior come in all shades of gray.
My favorite part, however, is while there is a lot of sex and romance, the core relationship of the show is the platonic friendship between the succubus and her human sidekick/roommate/BFF. It helps that Kenzi is by far the best thing about the show, but even if she wasn't amazing, I'd love it anyway for having such an awesome f-f friendship. They work together and tease each other and give advice and cuddle for comfort and the last finale did this great thing that showed that when it comes down to the wire, of all of Bo's friends and lovers, Kenzi is the one who is mostly solidly in her corner. The only genre show that I know of with anything comparable is Xena, and while I'm not saying Lost Girl is Xena (Anna Silk is no Lucy Lawless (who is?!)) it's still worth watching just for that.
