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.