So this is my second entry into the blogging world, sort of a companion blog to my first blog, although Christ alone knows why I thought I had the readership to justify this. So if anyone is paying attention, this blog will be about my love for television and more specifically the BBC iPlayer, which is something I value a bit more than oxygen these days.
In each post I will discuss things I've watched lately and what I thought about them, and with each post I'll talk about a series or season overall, probably one I've got on DVD or have seen recently or something. So, on with it.
Lately I've been quite impressed with SILK, that's been a slow-building but excellently written and beautifully characterful series about a Chamber of Barristers in London. It's a world that I don't know much about, in fact I could probably tell you more about American Trial Law than I could British, but that's just television for you.
For those that were unfortunate enough to watch OUTCASTS, I'll comment on that next time around, unless something more important crops up, but for this week, I'm gonna talk about that one particular little series that could, that has just come to the end of its third season.
BEING HUMAN.
So three years ago I heard vague mention of a series about a werewolf, a vampire and a ghost all living in a flat together and how everyone was saying that it was really funny and really good. I didn't see the first season at the time, but I caught it on the iPlayer later when they were gearing up for the second season and I can honestly say that I had some incredibly lukewarm feelings towards it.
Yes, the idea was good, the acting seemed to be pretty enjoyable and the basic stories were solid, but the problem to me was that they always felt like they were 40-minute stories stretched out to a 60-minute timeslot. This problem carried over into the second season but I was innured to it by the time that came around and I don't think it was an issue at all in the third season. I really felt like the show had got into its swing by season 3.
It felt as if the writers were also never quite sure how important to make Nina, since she was supporting at first, then massively important before suddenly disappearing and then being re-introduced Deus Ex Machina style for the end of the second season. Again, with the third, she'd settled into being the ferocious little house mother that we know she should have been all along, fitting in between George and Annie in that regard.
Mitchell had that weird conundrum of being sort of out of place with the other characters, but at the same time being the most interesting of them all, which is one of the things that has kept the show going this long.
The problem for me has always been the bad guys. Don't get me wrong, Herrick is brilliant. We love Herrick as a character, he works very, very well and he was the best thing about season 1. But was he the right choice for season 3?
Of course, the less said about Kemp and Jaggart the better, I don't know who thought that storyline was going to be in any way cathartic or useful, but they were downright wrong. Think they needed a copy of Hunter: The Vigil in order to get their heads around their own characters, it probably would have come in useful. They felt very out of place and as soon as they were gone we had no more use for them and they disappeared from the plot all together, because they didn't belong there in the first place. While a human antagonist is certainly a good idea, it needed a hell of a lot of work.
Being Human's biggest crime has always been, however, its season finales. Season 1 finale got to the climax about 15 minutes early, then had to pad it out with 15 minutes of talking, saying the same thing three times, and then getting to the good stuff, which was about as rewarding as finally getting your piece of birthday cake after someone's thrown up on it. The season 2 finale might as well have been 8 weeks of the most intense sexual chemistry you've ever experianced and then being stood up at the last minute, resulting in the most painful blue-balling known to man.
But now...?
Season 3 finished and the ending... the ending was just right. Oh, there was a bit of monologuing at the end, but by that point we'd already had our payoff and we were ahead of the game. This season finale was exactly what the doctor ordered, it pretty much makes up for the entire collection of faults the show had accrued by that point and it didn't over-stretch itself. We finally have a conclusion to the Box-Tunnel 20 storyline, which in itself was probably the best story idea that they'd ever come up with. So, Toby Whithouse, you managed to pull it off. And I wasn't sure that you actually had it in you...
Next week we talk about OUTCASTS.
No comments:
Post a Comment