Where Do We Go From Here?

The wife and I just finished our run-through of Buffy and are a good chunk into the final season of Angel. There will be a number of posts on those shows, rest assured, but this is not one of those posts. What struck me was that my wife had that sense of loss of finishing something and knowing that these characters are done. I realize that there are the comics for continued adventure but even at their best they’re still a bit off from the tone of the show. So, as the cast sang at the end of “Once More With Feeling”: where do we go from here? Take my hand, gentle readers, and I will show you. I will offer you up more television shows to help fill the excavated hole in your heart.

And the loss doesn’t have to be recent. Who among us doesn’t get that periodic twinge when they realize that a beloved series has ended. A random remembrance of that fact out of nowhere.  A flash that Harry Potter has grown up and moved away, that your favorite Starfleet ship has been decommissioned, that while you can relive Frodo’s journey again and again you will never be able to take one more new step with him. That if your home was in Sunnydale you truly can’t go home again.

So where do you go? It depends on what you’re missing from the series. People have the seasons they love and the seasons they don’t. That’s because Buffy is an amalgamation of a bunch of different genre shows which means that, depending on the story arc, it shifts in tone. That means you might like the quirky word play from the Scoobies or the emotional knife twisting of season 5. So I’ve come up with a couple of different aspects of Buffy and a show to match each one. Hopefully there’s something here to fill your yen.

The Middleman
An art student is recruited into a secret, crime fighting organization

For those who miss the early seasons, when it was quick and light.

This show is all about satirizing tropes and making good characters. The key element here is fun with an emphasis on word play. You know that ‘whedonesque’ patter? This has it in spades. From the banter between Wendy and The Middleman to the small side characters like Noser everyone here is quick, even when they’re being slow. It has a heavy hand of goofy in it, so if you really don’t like early Buffy then that may put you off

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Veronica Mars
The daughter of a private eye takes on her own cases at school

For those who miss later, complex seasons.

This keeps the quick dialog going but thematically focuses a lot more on the darker side of life. If you were interested in the idea of Buffy and Spike breaking down what abusive relationships are (whether or not you think it was successfully done) then this is the show for you. Once again, it’s a cast that feels like Scoobies. They’re quick, pop culture savvy, and whenever someone is at a loss for words it’s a character moment and not a break in the script. But it is dark. I’ll say trigger warning here and just take it as a given if you watch the show. You will squirm in some episodes, but you’ll laugh in almost all of them. And just like Buffy, the description of the show turned my off while watching one episode hooked me. The summary is a high school girl investigates crimes. But taking the show as just that would be like assuming Buffy is just a standard teen vampire romance. And you know it’s so much more.

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Lost Girl
A woman finds herself in the middle of Fae politics while trying to control her powers

For those that want the urban magic, and maybe some Dark Willow.

Do you want another fantasy show? Do you miss urban skewed mythological creatures? Did you enjoy the darker side of magic? Then this is the show for you. Take all of that and roll it together with a better portrayal of liquid sexuality than Willow ever got and you’ll come up with Lost Girl. The actual plot? It’s mainly thin magical political machinations draped over a frame of personal drama. But it’s fun! I’d say that the two leads, Bo and Dyson, get the plot but the fun characters are their sidekicks, Kenzi and Hale.

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Todd and the Book of Pure Evil
There’s a high school and some Satanists and also Jason Mewes and it’s gross and funny. And there are a couple of musical episodes

For those that wished there was a Buffy/Evil Dead 2 crossover.

This is basically the hybrid of those two. If the silly episodes of Buffy and the last season of Angel is Urban Fantasy Marx Brothers than Todd and the Book of Pure Evil is Urban Fantasy Three Stooges. It is gross and over the top and hilarious. This show is so much more than the sum of its parts that describing it won’t sell you on it. Just go watch if the above sounds like your thing.

What’s NEWs?

I’ve been gone for a while and I apologize. It’s been a perfect storm for imperfect TV blogging. First, I’ve been marathoning Angel and Buffy with the wife and once we got intoBuffy season 5/ Angel season 3 it’s been way too depressing to write about. Seriously Joss, you were running those two and Firefly. Things were great. Why was all of your TV so miserable?

The other reason is that my media center has been down, then up, and now replaced with a box I built myself from scratch yesterday. That means that even with what I’ve been watching, I have been in a bit of an engineer mindset. But I have been watching and waiting (to write), and I’m back.

Rather than dwell on sadness that has been my re-watching, or the disappointment of recently quit shows, I want to celebrate the coming of the new. This past season of new TV hasn’t been the greatest, but I have come away with a couple of shows that I’m pleasantly surprised with.

Sleepy Hollow. This show has quickly emerged with possibly the most rabid fans of dark humored contemporary supernatural apocalyptic storytelling since Supernatural. And why is that? The plotting is a bit thin, the interwoven historical action and contemporary story don’t always line up, and each episode’s mystery is just a bit too easy for the characters to solve. So what’s the appeal? Well, the acting is solid, the chemistry is perfect, and the characters are fun. They range from adorably gruff (Orlando Jones seems only to be rough around the edges because it makes him happy inside) to flat-out adorable (Tom Mison’s Ichabod is hilariously appalled by modern life and also has that ‘thing’ that Tom Hiddleston has where anything he says or does is automatically entertaining). That’s it and yet it is also enough.

It’s dark in direction but light in tone. Its plot is good enough to get you through. And yet at the end of each episode I felt incredibly entertained and satisfied. In a year of overly involved shows that are 100% plot driven or middling extensions of franchises, this off the wall, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink mythos in a package of fun is a welcomed addition. I avoided it at first for the remake aspect and the fact that the storylines I was hearing about weren’t engaging. If that’s what’s been keeping you away from this, then do yourself a favor and give it a watch.

The other show I’ve recently adopted is actually similar in tone. The stories are good enough but the end result of the show is still a delight to watch, and that’s Almost Human. A future where robots are sometimes indistinguishable from humans, not restrained by the laws of robotics, and framed with a gruff human detective? If you think that sounds a lot like Blade Runner, you’d be correct. And while we’re making comparisons, why not throw in the fact that he loves Asian noodles and extras are often seen carrying around umbrellas with glowing poles. Yup. Spot on. But the difference between this and Blade Runner is that Almost Human is funny. Karl Urban plays his cop like Harrison Ford but not so much Deckard as Han Solo. He’s fed up with everything but doesn’t have that dark resignation. Michael Ealy as his partner is fantastic. There’s no slow roll out of unrobotic quirks; rather, he is turned on and immediately picks up with his development from before the show and his dismantling.

The tone is actually more like the secret sit-com that Stargate SG-1 was so good at pulling off. The plots are serious but the characters and banter often sound so fun that you can imagine the writers simply refusing to cut it for the sake of tone. The result is a show that knows what it is. Another thing that helps with that self-awareness that keeps it from getting too heavy is the production. It looks like it has a good budget but the way they use it mostly for layering effects on existing, hyper-well lit sets rather than whole cloth scene rendering brings to mind a lot of Canadian shows like Continuum, Welcome to Paradox, and evenTotal Recall 2070, which was a cop show in the combined universe of Blade Runner andTotal Recall. This layering style and careful selection of physical settings gives the whole thing a cheap/expensive look, sort of as if the future were built out of cutting edge appliances. Nothing is dirty, everything looks like plastic and is lit like a commercial. It’s just enough to let them off the hook for lacking a gritty angle and that works for the funny tone that is throughout this procedural.