In Defense of Teen Wolf: Showing Up 20-Something David Boreanaz
Fans of genre shows have, I think, been primed to expect mediocrity edging towards downright cardboard acting in the shows we love. Say what you will about The Sentinel, Sliders, or especially Smallville, but they all lowered the bar for the kind of television we watch religiously and with little discrimination for the quality of the work. Buffy, Farscape, Battlestar Galactica--these were exceptions, not the rule.
I say this because I watch a lot of mediocre television. Not as much as I used to, before fifty hour work weeks and willful attempts at maintaining a social life, but enough to be steeped in the knowledge of kind of crappy yet still compelling fantasy/sci-fi/somewhere in the middle television series. And it's with that in mind that I figured I'd pick up Teen Wolf to have something to amuse me at the gym.
Let me introduce the Boreanaz Scale.
(Image credit
chaosraven who is the best first responder ever.)
The Boreanaz scale, named for you-know-who, is a kind of arbitrary but still generally useful scale for determining the quality of the television show you're watching. I base this primarily on the acting, because it could be the most compelling idea in the world (hi, Andromeda) with great production values (oh, Caprica) but if the acting isn't there to draw you in and keep you hooked (five seasons, six television movies, and three spin-offs of Babylon 5) your beloved show won't make it all the way. This is where Boreanaz comes in: stilted, creeper cardboard vampire in Buffy; fast-talking, charming sharpshooter in Bones. Two balanced sides of a scale.
Now, most genre television is going to hover around Season 1 Buffy. The acting is kind of weak, but the premise is compelling enough to make time for the actors to get things like experience, and be more comfortable with production notes. But then there's your Boreanaz 1 shows, your Smallvilles, who despite all odds and acting coaches manage to keep a wooden, anvilly show on the air for 10 seasons. And on the other side, your Boreanaz 6, you have your Battlestar Galacticas--tightly produced and paced shows that have a finite end point from the start and are always working towards that goal.
Stargate Atlantis? A solid Boreanaz 3. It had its moments, but it was a journeyman show. Firefly? Boreanaz 6. It should have had a longer life. SeaQuest DSV? Boreanaz 2. It could have done better, but it could have done so much worse.
Teen Wolf? Boreanaz 4.
I know, I know. I said the scale was arbitrary above, so clearly I'm just privileging a show with a lot of half-naked well-defined young men and their Blair Waldorf-esque female counterparts. I feel you. But here's the thing: what this show has in spades, what carries it beyond the 1997 Sarah Michelle Gellar award for Acting in a Teen Paranormal Series, is how shockingly nuanced the actors are with their characters.
Scott McCall, played by Tyler Posey, is the titular character who is undergoing his para-normality while suffering puberty. This could easily be a role that was phoned in for a decent first-title-credit paycheck from a network desperately trying to stay relevant in scripted tv. Instead, Posey takes his time with the role, swinging from intense, realistic anxiety attacks to small, silent, charming as fuck sly grins that are half-knowing to his audience. The fact that the show uses silence, instead of trying to fill every moment with tension and hipster-of-the-week music is shocking enough, but that Posey has enough command of his own talent to portray the many emotional states his character is put through shoots him into Ninth Doctor territory.
Scott's boyfriend best friend, Stiles, could also quickly and immediately suffer from The Best Friend curse, but the show gives the actor, Dylan O'Brien, room to clearly ad-lib some portion of his lines and feel out the dimensions of Stiles as a character. There are several scenes where, in most genre television, Stiles would have had a split-second reaction shot and then the camera would move on to the B-plot, or another show of Posey's admittedly impressive musculature. But rather than use Stiles as a gag machine, the show gives him moments of reflection, moments where he's talking to himself, or reviewing some research, that give him depth and dimension that would otherwise be ignored if not outright discarded on my beloved Roswell.
And in a show with a clear (and unremarkably predictable) bias towards male cast members, the two female characters, Allison Argent (Crystal Reed) and Lydia Martin (Holland Roden) do have more characterization than your average "Lana's parents are dead" lip service. I have not yet watched the whole first season, but while Allison and Lydia have not yet made the show pass the Bechdel test, the writers have given them details and backgrounds that have less to do with the men they are respectively dating than with them as individual characters. It leaves the door open for more robust characterization, which is better than the treatment most teenaged females get in similar shows without an identified female protagonist.
That's not to say that the show doesn't have it's Moonlight moments: the plot is pedestrian, and the tension, while believable, is manufactured more through the cinematography and the scoring than the writing. But on the whole, I've been delighted with the rampant thread of humour--intentional and unintentional--as well as the subtle, talented nuance in the wide swathe of emotions. I expected Smallville, and I got Haven, and I'm telling you all of this so that you won't dismiss Teen Wolf and its silly, outwardly non-compelling appearance. Fans of The Vampire Diaries or Roswell and the casual fans of Supernatural probably are already sold, but for everyone else--especially those who've seen the crazy shit (<3) that's come out of the fandom response to Teen Wolf (thanks, Slash Report) let me tell you: this show isn't what you think it is. It's not The Sarah Connor Chronicles (Boreanaz 5), but it's not Earth: Final Conflict (Boreanaz 1), either.
Give it a chance. You, like I was, may very well be pleasantly surprised.
I say this because I watch a lot of mediocre television. Not as much as I used to, before fifty hour work weeks and willful attempts at maintaining a social life, but enough to be steeped in the knowledge of kind of crappy yet still compelling fantasy/sci-fi/somewhere in the middle television series. And it's with that in mind that I figured I'd pick up Teen Wolf to have something to amuse me at the gym.
Let me introduce the Boreanaz Scale.
(Image credit
chaosraven who is the best first responder ever.)
The Boreanaz scale, named for you-know-who, is a kind of arbitrary but still generally useful scale for determining the quality of the television show you're watching. I base this primarily on the acting, because it could be the most compelling idea in the world (hi, Andromeda) with great production values (oh, Caprica) but if the acting isn't there to draw you in and keep you hooked (five seasons, six television movies, and three spin-offs of Babylon 5) your beloved show won't make it all the way. This is where Boreanaz comes in: stilted, creeper cardboard vampire in Buffy; fast-talking, charming sharpshooter in Bones. Two balanced sides of a scale.
Now, most genre television is going to hover around Season 1 Buffy. The acting is kind of weak, but the premise is compelling enough to make time for the actors to get things like experience, and be more comfortable with production notes. But then there's your Boreanaz 1 shows, your Smallvilles, who despite all odds and acting coaches manage to keep a wooden, anvilly show on the air for 10 seasons. And on the other side, your Boreanaz 6, you have your Battlestar Galacticas--tightly produced and paced shows that have a finite end point from the start and are always working towards that goal.
Stargate Atlantis? A solid Boreanaz 3. It had its moments, but it was a journeyman show. Firefly? Boreanaz 6. It should have had a longer life. SeaQuest DSV? Boreanaz 2. It could have done better, but it could have done so much worse.
Teen Wolf? Boreanaz 4.
I know, I know. I said the scale was arbitrary above, so clearly I'm just privileging a show with a lot of half-naked well-defined young men and their Blair Waldorf-esque female counterparts. I feel you. But here's the thing: what this show has in spades, what carries it beyond the 1997 Sarah Michelle Gellar award for Acting in a Teen Paranormal Series, is how shockingly nuanced the actors are with their characters.
Scott McCall, played by Tyler Posey, is the titular character who is undergoing his para-normality while suffering puberty. This could easily be a role that was phoned in for a decent first-title-credit paycheck from a network desperately trying to stay relevant in scripted tv. Instead, Posey takes his time with the role, swinging from intense, realistic anxiety attacks to small, silent, charming as fuck sly grins that are half-knowing to his audience. The fact that the show uses silence, instead of trying to fill every moment with tension and hipster-of-the-week music is shocking enough, but that Posey has enough command of his own talent to portray the many emotional states his character is put through shoots him into Ninth Doctor territory.
Scott's boyfriend best friend, Stiles, could also quickly and immediately suffer from The Best Friend curse, but the show gives the actor, Dylan O'Brien, room to clearly ad-lib some portion of his lines and feel out the dimensions of Stiles as a character. There are several scenes where, in most genre television, Stiles would have had a split-second reaction shot and then the camera would move on to the B-plot, or another show of Posey's admittedly impressive musculature. But rather than use Stiles as a gag machine, the show gives him moments of reflection, moments where he's talking to himself, or reviewing some research, that give him depth and dimension that would otherwise be ignored if not outright discarded on my beloved Roswell.
And in a show with a clear (and unremarkably predictable) bias towards male cast members, the two female characters, Allison Argent (Crystal Reed) and Lydia Martin (Holland Roden) do have more characterization than your average "Lana's parents are dead" lip service. I have not yet watched the whole first season, but while Allison and Lydia have not yet made the show pass the Bechdel test, the writers have given them details and backgrounds that have less to do with the men they are respectively dating than with them as individual characters. It leaves the door open for more robust characterization, which is better than the treatment most teenaged females get in similar shows without an identified female protagonist.
That's not to say that the show doesn't have it's Moonlight moments: the plot is pedestrian, and the tension, while believable, is manufactured more through the cinematography and the scoring than the writing. But on the whole, I've been delighted with the rampant thread of humour--intentional and unintentional--as well as the subtle, talented nuance in the wide swathe of emotions. I expected Smallville, and I got Haven, and I'm telling you all of this so that you won't dismiss Teen Wolf and its silly, outwardly non-compelling appearance. Fans of The Vampire Diaries or Roswell and the casual fans of Supernatural probably are already sold, but for everyone else--especially those who've seen the crazy shit (<3) that's come out of the fandom response to Teen Wolf (thanks, Slash Report) let me tell you: this show isn't what you think it is. It's not The Sarah Connor Chronicles (Boreanaz 5), but it's not Earth: Final Conflict (Boreanaz 1), either.
Give it a chance. You, like I was, may very well be pleasantly surprised.