I am at Comic Con! There are nerds everywhere! Even in my hotel room, because I am here with
fox1013 and
mimesere! We went to Preview Night, and all of the shows Warner Bros. were doing were amazing. Let me check my ~notes~.
Human Target: I loved this. There was an explosion in the teaser! Then there was a train and its brakes were broken so that if it braked again it would explode, and if it didn't it would derail and then explode! Then at the end there was another explosion! Mark Valley and Chi McBride and Jackie Earl Haley! There was a fistfight in an air vent on a moving bullet train! Plus Tricia Helfer guest-starred, as did Doc Cottle! Guys, it had Rorschach being sociopathic at Doc Cottle; what more could I ask for from TV?
Well, more female characters, it turns out. There were no female regulars, from what I could tell. I was hoping they might bring Tricia Helfer's character on as their tech geek or something, owing to how her storyline turned out, and she was treated pretty well by the main character. It was good with race, too; Sheila pointed out that JEH's character had a Hispanic last name, and Chi McBride was obviously awesome, so we've got a white guy, a black guy, and a Hispanic guy as the main cast. Unfortunately, they are all guys. I suspect that given a season or two they will introduce a female main, but given the way it went down with SPN fandom I think that might be too late.
Sheila also suspects that this will get canceled pretty quickly, because it's a Monster Of The Week show and those don't last without some kind of mytharc to hang things on. In my heart of hearts I think she's probably right, but I do have some hope. It mostly targets the same audience, as she pointed out, as Burn Notice and its ilk, namely grown-ups fighting crime and blowing things up, and that market may be pretty well full with similar shows already. But basically I am going to watch it SO HARD for all of however few episodes it has, and I am going to love the shit out of it, because except for the complete lack of female characters it's basically the show of my heart, and once it introduces a female main it will be the show of my heart.
V: I don't really have much to say about this one. Sheila was the one of us watching for the nostalgia factor, and she was underwhelmed by a lot of aspects of it. It had more female characters; unfortunately, only one of them wasn't Clearly Evil or Clearly Doomed. They also made the black guy the alien who had defected and gone over to fight on the humans' side, and we were all kind of amazed that they had the balls to go with making the black guy the race traitor. Sheila also felt it worked better as a Cold War show than a Terrorism show, and even without being able to compare, I think she's right. Basically they tried to cram a miniseries' worth of development into the pilot. Morena Baccarin as evil alien high commander, though, was brilliant casting, because she played that really well.
Vampire Diaries: This was so amazing. Basically this is the show of Amy's heart. It is a complete throwback to the classic CW teen dramas of the '90s; it's like if you put Dawson's Creek and Twilight together and threw in a little True Blood for good measure. Like, I couldn't even be that distressed by the "stalking is ~romantic~!" thing it had in common with Twilight, because this show was so freaking over the top it was impossible for me to take it seriously. Plus Emo Vampire wasn't a complete dick and verbally abusive to Alaina, the way Edward was to Bella, which made it easier.
Even I thought they were playing up the vampcest aspect, too, and I roll my eyes at people who think SPN panders to Wincesters. JFC, one of them says "let's do it...together!" to the other; even I had to admit that was pretty freaking incesty. Plus they're vampires, and everyone knows all bets are off where vampires are concerned. Even better, the main character is actually a decent actress. I also have an evil mastermind plan to get in on the ground floor of the fandom by writing a Damon/Dean Winchester story now and posting it minutes after the pilot airs, but the flaw in this plan is that if it succeeds, I will probably end up attracting the kind of people who will take at least one of these shows seriously, to say nothing of both.
In short, it was completely brilliant, which is to say so completely terrible it was amazing. It's not even my kind of bad, normally, but it was so horrible even I was charmed by it. Plus it's set in Virginia! A Virginia that looks NOTHING LIKE the Pacific Northwest, but still. Basically I am so okay with the SPN people leaving for this show, partly because I'm fine with the crazies leaving SPN fandom in general, and partly because the main alternative for SPN people these days seems to be writing fic where the Jonas Brothers are fucking each other, and I am so many kinds of not okay with that.
Plus its abbreviation is VD, and honestly I can't think of anything better than that. Fandom is probably going to try to come up with something less hilarious, like VampDi or VampD or something, but no. It's always going to be VD in my heart.
We also stared in horror at the people camped out for the Twilight panel when we got there around three PM yesterday. The Twilight panel is today. In the afternoon. But Burger King was handing out crowns with Twilight characters on them, so of course we picked those up! I got Team Edward and Amy got Team Jacob.
Today: Middlepanel! And Gail Simone! :D :D :D And lots of other stuff, but those are the ones I think I care the most about. &GAILSIMONE; We were thinking about going to the Watchmen Director's Cut screening, but I think our plan now is to just buy the DVD and watch it in our hotel room, where there will be no JEH or Snyder, but also no fanboys, and there will be booze.
Currently we're waiting for the Middlepanel to start. \o/