Telly stuff

[shapinglight]

I uploaded a Bill n' Sookie icon the other day, but more in the spirit of irony than anything. Not become a 'shipper.

That aside...

Spoilers within for True Blood season 1, up to ep 10 (I think it was) and Misfits ep 4.



....I'm still enjoying True Blood a lot. The ep I watched last night was the one where Evil Amy killed poor Eddie the (mostly) harmless vampire and Bill was put on trial at the vampire court. This show does handle vampires very differently to BtVS in lots of ways, doesn't it (which you would expect, of course, given that the vampires in BtVS were mostly plot devices and when they weren't, ruined the show, if some people are to be believed). For one thing, though BtVS vampires regard people as food, the only time there was any suggestion of them setting themselves up as a superior race to humans was in The Wish, which was a What If scenario. Most of the time, they're shown as more like pests than anything, with Buffy as pest controller-in-chief. Even other demons look down on them. In True Blood, the vampires have their own parallel society, which seems to operate rather like the Wishverse, with humans kept as pets or slaves and regarded as little more than animals, but which apparently hasn't impinged on human society enough to get them noticed and exterminated. In fact, Bill keeps telling Sookie stuff that he says vampires don't want people in general to know, presumably because if they did know, the vampires are afraid they would be exploited and killed the way Eddie is in this ep.

So, though they go around acting all superior, they in fact have an awful lot of weaknesses and are very vulnerable, though you can't really feel sorry for them because en masse, like BtVS vampires, they aren't nice at all.

Interesting.

On a more shallow note, I was looking at Eric in last night's ep and thinking, yes, I get that he's handsome etc, but I'm afraid he doesn't do a lot for me. If anything, he's too perfect. I would probably like him better if he had a funny nose or bad skin or bandy legs, or some other defect. Never have gone for classically handsome.

I know a couple of people on my flist are still watching Misfits. I thought last week's ep (the Curtis ep) was very good, though possibly the time warping aspect of it doesn't bear too much thinking about. Poor old Curtis! No matter how hard he tried to make sure everything ended well for everyone, it just kept going wrong, didn't it? Also, I wonder if this ep was supposed to make us feel more or less sympathetic to Twazzock Boy Nathan? Have to say, my sympathies were with his dad. He really is a little git. Oh, and Simon is extremely creepy. Also, anyone else think it was quite sweet that Kelly found her boyfriend proposing to her using a stolen engagement ring he'd found in a car they'd broken into romantic?

Just me, then.

In other telly news, I just finished re-watching season 2 of Babylon 5. Yes, it looks clunky at times and I have to say, I find a little Brue Boxleitner goes a very long way, but even after all this time, I still love that show.

Comments

[flake-sake.livejournal.com]

Babylon 5 is a masterpiece, I wish someone would make a scifi show that good again.

Concerning True blood: Can't say Eric did much for me in the first season, because I found he looked like a pimp.

But in S2 he gets really up to speed and he's shown in some incrdibly funny scenes and even one actually haertbraking one.

[menomegirl.livejournal.com]

Eric becomes a heck of a lot more interesting in season 2; rather a lot like Spike did after Angel turned into Angelus.

I like True Blood; it's my guilty pleasure. It's total crackfic.

[shapinglight]

Babylon 5 is a masterpiece, I wish someone would make a scifi show that good again.

Yes, it's pretty impressive still, especially if you remember that the only other comparable sci fi show at that time was ST:TNG, which was still stuck in the groove of having everyone revert to their default settings in every episode, no matter what trauma they'd experienced the week before.

I'm looking forward to season 2. I hope it won't be too long before it turns up on terrestrial (will be a while, though, as it hasn't yet been shown on cable over here).

[shapinglight]

I like True Blood; it's my guilty pleasure. It's total crackfic.

I know what you mean. I feel pretty much the same, though must say it's well-written crackfic. :)

[petzipellepingo.livejournal.com]

There will be more Eric and Bill and other vampires in Season Two which greatly expands their "Verse" and adds more layers. And yes, it's well written crackfic, which is why it's such fun to watch.

[quinara]

Yeah, I thought Misfits was really good! Though going by the previews for next week, Curtis has still messed things up (though I imagine he'll sort them out). I was a bit confused at how he managed to leap into a future where he's cheating on his girlfriend with Alisha, since it seemed to act as though the things he hadn't necessarily changed stayed the same, yet the stuff he did change (like presumably seeing his girlfriend again with her out of prison) didn't affect the other things he did (like getting with Alisha), though that whole situation would have definitely gone down differently in different circumstances. Very odd.

Though Kelly's still great!

[shapinglight]

There will be more Eric and Bill and other vampires in Season Two which greatly expands their "Verse"

I'm looking forward to that. True Blood has struck a nice balance, I think, in making both human and vampire characters interesting, though the humans are still the lead at the point I've got to.

[shapinglight]

Though Kelly's still great!

Isn't she just, even when she's drunk? Seeing as ep 2 was all about Twazzock Boy, ep 4 about Curtis and tonight's seems to be about Simon, I hope this means the last ep is All About Kelly. Alisha got rather short shrift, I thought, in ep 3, and I wouldn't like the same to happen to the other main female character.

I don't understand what happened with Curtis either. It's probably not a good idea to look into it too deeply. I do feel sorry for him. He seems to have ended up in the s**t, despite trying to sort things out so both his ex and Alisha would be okay, at the expense of his own career.

[whichclothes.livejournal.com]

Glad you're still enjoying True Blood. With me, I think it's Eric's bad but also kinda sensitive boy persona that does it for me. What can I say? I'm a sucker for that. Has Dexter been showing there? Those two shows are literally the only current ones I'm watching.

[shapinglight]

Dexter has been shown here, but unfortunately I've missed it all. I'm hoping to catch up on DVD. I have seen a couple of episodes and thought they were very good (plus, Julie Benz, never a bad thing), but it was shown very late at night and I'm afraid I just lost track.

[trepkos.livejournal.com]

My favourite line was from the Magistrate, when he said the human "cow" had no feelings, but was just responding to stimuli.
I hope that girl who killed Eddie gets eaten. That girl's getting vegans a bad name! Just my luck she'll get turned instead.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

I thought Eddie was very important to the show, necessary even, because for all of Bill's protestations about wanting to mainstream, nearly all the vampires we know are killers. It's not actually prejudice against them when they are killing people. The Eddie plot made clear that humans can be every bit as predatory given the right circumstances. The vampire could be the prey. It was necessary, I thought, to balance out the True Blood-verse.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

I found he looked like a pimp.

I kept mentally yelling, 'Stop posing, damn it!'

[shapinglight]

That girl's getting vegans a bad name!

It's all right. She can't be a proper vegan, no matter what she says, because she drinks blood.

[shapinglight]

Yes, I'd agree with that. Apart from Bill, until Eddie turned up, the vampires were anything but sympathetic. I think the character showed that the other vampires' bloodthirstiness and lack of empathy for humans was as much nurture as nature.

Whether the show will go anywhere with that, I don't know, of course. Everyone says it's best not to overthink it.

[gillo]

We're still hooked on

Misfits

. R loves Pillock Boy - he's pretty and this episode he had a couple of redeeming moments but he is a total wazzock otherwise. Next week is the last ep, and I don't see it ending well for some of them.

It's weird, 'cos it's

Heroes

with all the gloss removed. These are mostly not nice people, even the authorty figures. Morally very dark.

[whichclothes.livejournal.com]

It's definitely worth watching, and in order. Julie Benz's part is a small one, but she'd very good, I think. This season ends on Sunday and it's been very exciting!

[kseenaa.livejournal.com]

I kinda like Eric in True Blood, but I have liked Alexander Skarsgård before he landed the role, so... :-) I do very much like the take on vampires in True Blood as well. :-) It is interesting and refreshing, even if they do go back to much off the old legends but take a new twist on them. :-) I like that.

[shapinglight]

R loves Pillock Boy - he's pretty and this episode he had a couple of redeeming moments but he is a total wazzock otherwise

Yes, I have moments of liking him too. Then he'll do something to remind me how irritating he is most of the time. He is pretty, though.

[shapinglight]

Yes, it's good to see the vampire characters get some kind of context. I always felt they never really had that in BtVS, but of course that wasn't a show about vampires.

[lyr]

You know, I didn't really find Eric personally attractive until I saw him on his knees sobbing heartbrokenly. That changed the way I see him entirely. Before, I thought he was probably cute in a sort of objective way. Now? I could eat him with a spoon.

As for Babylon 5, I still adore that show wholeheartedly. If I'd gotten into fandom earlier, I'm sure I would have written a lot of it. As it is, I still love re-watching it, too.

[shapinglight]

You know, I didn't really find Eric personally attractive until I saw him on his knees sobbing heartbrokenly

At the point where I am, that's hard to imagine, but I can see how it would change people's view of the character and make him more appealing. Roll on season 2.

I've been so relieved to discover I still love B5. It was the first show I was ever fannish about, back in the days of privately circulated fanzines received once a month in the mail. As then, so now, my major problem is with Bruce Boxleitner. I loved the character of Sinclair and didn't want him replaced, and Boxleitner seems to me the epitome of a certain kind of American male TV actor that was very prevalent in the 70s/80s. However, as I remember, he does improve in later seasons, and I can see that the character of Sheridan works even if I don't like the actor much.

[lyr]

You know, I thought at the time (and still do) that cleary Sinclair was meant to be the guy. All the foreshadowing pointed to it, and it took some convolutions to replace him in the storyline with Sheridan. I figure something must have happened to make the actor unavailable, and I hypothesize that JMS did his best to roll with that. I still get the urge every so often to try re-writing B5 with Sinclair, as I think it was originally intended---but that would be such an arduous undertaking that I always talk some sense into myself instead.

[shapinglight]

Yes, it would be quite an undertaking.

As for the replacement of Sinclair, I've heard three versions: the first is JMS's official one, which is that he always meant to do it, which I flat don't believe because, as you say, Sinclair was clearly 'the One.' The second is the sort of semi-official version, which is that JMS was threatened with cancellation if he didn't replace Michael O'Hare with someone better known who would be more of a draw to viewers.

The third very unofficial version, which I only came across quite recently, was that Michael O'Hare was a very unpleasant person who sexually harassed female cast members and made himself unbearable to pretty much everyone. I saw this being discussed on a fanforum. One poster brought the story over and everyone else refused to believe it, so I have no idea whether there was any truth in it at all.

I would think that even if it were true, the semi-official version would also hold true as a reason why JMS might have replaced Sinclair.

I also can't help thinking that if the unofficial version were true, there would be more said about it all this time afterwards, but as far as I know none of the actresses have said anything.