TV review: Being Human (American version) episode 1
No spoilers, but plenty of rantage.
Are they serious?
I can't even...I don't even know how to...how do I even begin to describe how bad this is?
True, loving the original BBC series biases me. That's probably why I'm annoyed instead of amused at how awful this remake is. However, even had I never seen the original, I couldn't miss how this new Being Human started out mediocre and grew terrible all by itself as the minutes passed.
The premise is the same for both versions. A sex-addicted vampire trying to abstain from blood and a neurotic Jewish werewolf with no idea what to do now that he's deadly once a month move into an apartment with a sweetheart ghost who's not sure how she died or why she can't move on. They make friends and try to be human, though as the show goes on, they begin questioning what that means, and what parts of humanity they want to keep.
"I know!" said Producer A, looking at the original material and preparing to write up a proposal for the new series. "Let's get rid of that silly 'personality' and 'sense of humor' angle, and make the vampire all sex, all the time! He'll be all sex, sex, sex, and bite hot women, and be tempted at all times by yet MORE hot women, and the vampire hangout will be full of hot women he can roll around with!"
"Perfect," said Producer B. "Then we don't even have to hire someone who can act. In fact, let's make sure the leads are all terrible actors who destroy dramatic AND comedic scenes, because then we can pay them less."
"Even better," said Producer A, "If any of them show signs of talent, we can make sure they have no chemistry with each other, so the friendship between the main three characters will be boring at best and unwatchably annoying at worst. And why don't we give them long, stilted passages of exposition where they angst about their supernatural conditions to bore the audience silly with?"
"Well then, we'll want to take out everything interesting about all the characters, not just the vampire, and just make them all angst and sex, angst and sex, angst and sex," Producer B noted. "It works for the CW, and SyFy is looking for more female viewers, right?"
Sigh.
There's mild hope for the show in that the script wasn't bad in the first half. If the writers get hold of their runaway CW-itis, and actors were just at their worst because of a crap director or because they're not comfortable with their characters yet, this might turn out to be vaguely watchable background material. But right now, it's not looking good.
*
My review of series one of the British Being Human
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