I figured that a service which encourages fan fiction was something to be wary of, until I read Sean O’Neal’s joke about an all-vampire Sweeney Todd. Guess I know what I’m doing this weekend.
As a follow-up to last week’s post, it seems the Locke and Key film trilogy is no longer a rumor.
Casting wishes? Nina Dobrev and Ian Somerhalder as the female and male versions of Dodge?
I love that the Firefly panel did so well, but honestly, how would it not? My favorite part of this story, though, is the fact that people who had never seen The Legend of Korra were won over by its panel, which they only saw in passing, and have decided to watch the show now. You put out a good product, and people will find it, even if not right away.
Too bad about The Vampire Diaries, though.
Someone favorited this tweet today, nearly 5 months after I posted it.
I was so close, and yet so far…
I was going to write something about my feelings on the third season of The Vampire Diaries, but my DVR (which I have come to refer to as Woodhouse) failed to record the season finale tonight. Woodhouse is going to get surprise stabbed so hard.
This season of The Vampire Diaries has not been as compelling (no pun intended) as the previous two. It has had some absolutely killer episodes as well as a few clunkers. In this article, the writers at io9. discuss some of their least favorite plot lines currently in play on the show, including the fact that suddenly Alaric’s anti-death ring is turning him into a serial killer. However, the one that really struck me is the claim that Elena needs to remember that Damon tried to kill Jeremy in Season 2. This show usually pays incredibly close attention to details of its characters’ pasts, so the fact that no one ever mentions that Damon nearly killed Jeremy last year is a bit surprising. (Damon intended to turn Jeremy into a vampire, when Jeremy was still angsting over Anna, but that of course required killing him.) With three episodes left, I hope that the show can finish strong and set up an interesting plot for Season 4.
Last night, some Twitter friends and I took one person’s idea - a bar where people can gather and watch TV together - and created a crazy, multi-room establishment with each room being dedicated to a show. These are the results:
I realized that I had not yet seen a Tumblr dedicated to the badass bromance team of Damon Salvatore and Alaric Saltzman, so I decided to look one up. Fortunately, it exists.
This is a link to today’s TV Club Classic review of Scrubs. In it, the reviewer points out his frustration with how TV reporting is done nowadays, which allows for rampant spoilers.
Most sources of information for entertainment (McNutt specifically points to Entertainment Weekly’s Michael Ausiello) will report on shows hiring guest stars to appear on multi-episode arcs. This can be exciting, learning that a great actor will appear on our favorite show, but is also has the unfortunate result of telling us how long this person will be around. Therefore, if we know that a specific actor will appear in four episodes, when his or her character is put in mortal peril in his or her first episode, there is no tension, because the character is nearly guaranteed survival. (Only a select few shows can get around this; it’s not outside of the realm of possibility to imagine The Vampire Diaries introducing a new guest star as a human, then making him or her a vampire for the remainder of his or her arc.) But even then, we know that the character won’t stay dead for at least a few more episodes, and we know that he or she will leave at a certain point. We know that the character won’t become recurring until new episodes are filmed, if at all.
Another problem, which McNutt doesn’t allude to specifically (he was more focused on the issue addressed in the previous paragraph), is episode-by-episode press releases. I remember back when I was watching LOST, the releases submitted by ABC would state which actors were going to guest star in each episode. If the actor played a recurring character on the show, it was pretty easy to guess what the episode would be about. For example, if Marshal Mars was set to appear, it was almost certainly a Kate episode, whereas the appearance of Penny usually signaled a Desmond episode. This isn’t as bad as the first problem, but sometimes revealing that a character will show up will ruin the surprise, especially if the character has been away for an extended period of time or was assumed dead. I’m nearly certain that Christian Kane was left off the release for the Angel episode “Destiny” for this very purpose: the reappearance of Lindsey was the episode’s twist.
You might think I’m crazy. A show with a title like The Vampire Diaries can’t possibly be good, right? Especially a show on The CW. And it features vampires impersonating teenagers to go to high school so they can meet teenage women? No thank you.
But remember that Angel tried to get together with a high school student with whom he fell in love at first sight. Everyone loves Buffy! And Veronica Mars was on The CW for a year after The WB and UPN merged. Say what you will about that season of Veronica Mars, it’s still a great show.
Sadly, even taking those thoughts into consideration, it can still be hard to take the show seriously having never seen it. I certainly didn’t. It took months of recommendations from a friend as well as constant praise from more than half the critics from The A.V. Club to make me realize the show was something worth at least checking out. I think the tipping point came when io9. published this article. So I started watching it.
Let me be perfectly clear: the first 3 or 4 episodes are near-total crap. The pilot engages in nearly every teen show cliche imaginable. But I was warned of this, so I kept going. Furthermore, if nothing else, those episodes were saved from complete worthlessness by the presence of Ian Somerhalder. Yes, the guy that played Boone on LOST was not only the best thing about a show, he was absolutely magnetic. He played his villainous character so gleefully that it was impossible not to have fun right along with him during those first few episodes.
And then things kicked into high gear. Suddenly, all of the terrible cliches melted away, and we were left with a streamlined, utterly enjoyable thriller of a show. As the lead article points out, bad guys are bad and do bad things, the plot barrels ahead like few shows on TV, and the characters are just fun as hell to watch. The show certainly has flaws (what show doesn’t) but it works so well in spite of those flaws. Definitely something worth looking into.
P.S.
Yes, I realize that, at first glance, vampires’ ability to walk in sunlight is dumb. But the reason for it is handled well, and, (STOP READING IF YOU WANT TO REMAIN COMPLETELY UNSPOILED) the ability is not inherent to vampires in this mythology. They are still vulnerable to the sun, but some have found ways to protect themselves.
