| Jan. 7th, 2009 @ 08:01 pm Never mind the quality, feel the perkiness |
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So I'd been half-looking forward to, half-dreading Demons, ITV's attempt to snag some of the Doctor Who audience by making a Lidl Buffy. I figured even if I didn't end up making this a show I reviewed every week, at least I'd try and write something after the opening episode. This was scuppered a bit after actually watching the damn thing, when I was stunned into silence. And not in a good way. But ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) emohawk9000 asked for it, and apparently I do do requests, so brace yourselves as I try to work out what the hell they were thinking.
Now, me posting pictures of topless young men from TV shows is hardly a novelty, but the nipples are usually just a pleasant bonus, not the sole reason to watch the show. Sadly this isn't the case here - these perky babies are all Demons has going for it.
I'd been calling this show Lidl Buffy long before it actually aired, but even I didn't think the term would be that accurate. People have been trying to make a British Buffy for years (the new Doctor Who has had a ton of Joss Whedon injected into the already successful formula) but they've never been this shameless, or pointless. Nipple-owner Christian Cooke (Ross from the Sontaran episodes of Who Season 4) plays Buffy Luke, the last descendant of a long line of superpowered people who find vampires and demons "freaks" and, er, slay them. Philip Glenister plays his mentor, Rupert Giles Galvin, who's from the other side of the Atlantic. Their headquarters is a library full of mystical texts oh wait I don't have to cross that out - their headquarters actually is a library full of mystical texts.
Ah, but there's a ZOMGtwist! Yes, where Buffy had instantly engaging characters, a well thought-out mythology and, crucially, witty and memorable dialogue, Demons decided it'd do without those. In its one attempt to distance itself from the original (a case of locking the stable door after the horse has bolted if ever there was one) our heroes don't fight things called vampires, demons etc - no, "we don't name them," they just categorise them according to how dangerous they are. Which could work if it came across as the humans depersonalising the monsters to make it easier to kill them. It came across more like "we don't name them - we can't be arsed."
Oh dear, this isn't looking good, is it? Let's brighten things up in the same (and only) way the TV show uses:
*phew* That'll keep us going a little longer. Frankly, all I can do now is list just a few of the things wrong with the opener:
- Philip Glenister's American accent. I did have my suspicions as to why we didn't hear him speak much in the trailers. My suspicions were correct. Apart from being shit, the accent was totally pointless.
- It looked cheap, never more so than in the credits which looked like leftover footage from a mid-90s video game.
- The acting in general. It was not good.
- Mackenzie Crook had been hyped up by the publicity as the Big Bad, implicitly for the whole season. Turns out he probably spent more time in the makeup chair than in front of the camera, before getting killed very easily. Apart from immediately killing off someone whose face takes up half the space on the promotional posters, he was apparently a really dangerous customer, so there goes the peril - yeah, they're nasty, but they can be deaded very easily.
- And speaking of Mackenzie Crook spending time in the makeup chair... Actually do I even have to say anything? The baddies are supposed to be a bit scary, surely?
- Glenister inexplicably launching into cod-Shakesperean "thou diest, fiend" gibberish every time he confronted a monster. WTF?
- Sometimes music is used in TV shows well. Sometimes it's used badly. Demons' first episode featured the clumsiest use of pop music I've ever seen: Luke's friend Ruby is in danger, Luke runs after her calling out "Ruby!" and immediately we get "Ruby" by the Kaiser Chiefs played in too loudly. The worst of it is, I bet they only named the character Ruby so they could do that. *shudder*
- Most worryingly, I find I don't actually fancy Christian Cooke at all when he has clothes on. Again, with some of the gents who regularly appear on here, like Messrs Boys, Tovey and Sutton f'rinstance, toplessness is just a bonus, I find them rather lovely even in clothes. Whereas Cooke has nice eyes, but this sort of slack-jawed vacant face that does nothing for me. Unless he does all his fight scenes topless like this one, it just ain't going to work.
Rumour has it the rest of the episodes won't feature Mr Cooke's nipples at all, so there may be trouble ahead.
At the end of the day, if the writing had been good a lot of the rest wouldn't have mattered, but the writing was flat, charmless and derivative. The show's co-created by some of the people behind Merlin so you'd expect something a bit better - maybe Luke will acquire a young male friend to have unsubtle flirtations with? They're bringing Richard Wilson with them next week anyway, complete with Gaius wig, so we can only hope he yells "Sorcery!" at some point - that'd help improve anything, quite frankly.
The Radio Times preview suggests the second episode is a massive improvement, so I'll stick with it - in any case the run is only 6 episodes so it's not a massive investment of time. On the downside 6 episodes means they don't have much time to turn things around, if improvements are on the horizon... |
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