#44
Post
by Murdoch » Tue Mar 04, 2014 2:43 am
It's sad to see my TV guilty pleasure, the US Being Human, is on its last legs and just a few episodes away from its end. The show had a Gen-Y sense of humor, with characters joking with that ironic glibness anyone whose spent time with twentysomethings is familiar with, that never quite matched the show's dark tone. The AV Club had a hilarious pan of it, with the reviewer giving up on it somewhere early in its third season, and the points s/he brought up were all sound. Still, having watched my fair share of fantasy/supernatural trash (something just about every show about vampires/werewolves/etc. inevitably turns into) I found it rather endearing how Being Human managed to check the boxes of all the subgenre's cliches that date back to the Buffy days: alternate timeline, check; convoluted mythology that the writers simply add onto to fit any given plot, check; flashback to vampire's past where he's a heinous murder-machine, check. I'm sure there's plenty more to add to that shortlist.
And yet, as a seasoned viewer of supernatural trash high and low, there was something watchable about the show, at least in its early seasons where it was largely aping the UK original. It had something that so many shows dealing with creatures that go bump in the night lack: a sense of humor about its characters' circumstances. It didn't veer into True Blood's silliness but instead was much like an ensemble comedy at times. The recent explosion of these types of shows is an interesting cultural phenomenon, and even notable examples like the near-decade old Supernatural perpetuate themselves to the point of redundancy. I guess it's just that this subgenre is a TV writer's dream, a goldmine of endless stories that can be conjured up with little more explanation than "a wizard did it."
Anyway, ignore my stream of consciousness appreciation of the show, and don't take this as a full-blown recommendation of what amounts to a halfway decent show. I'm merely lamenting the end of a show I can go either way on, if that even makes sense.