Still Still Waiting for a Big Winner

On Thursday and Friday, I tried out a couple more new TV series, and I still have to say, I don't have anything "great" to report.

Thursday was Big Shots on ABC. Frankly, most of the reviews I saw of the show were pretty savage. But I felt obligated to give it a try anyway because of the presence of three actors I liked from other shows (Dylan McDermott from The Practice, Michael Vartan from Alias, and Joshua Malina from The West Wing and Sports Night).

I didn't even finish watching the entire episode.

The writing was just excruciating. It was like Sex and the City with guys, but guys acting and talking like the women on SatC talked (sanitized for non-HBO, anyway). It was preposterous and false that these kinds of discussions would be taking place anywhere among guys like this.

What's sad is that Rob Thomas, creator of the brilliant Veronica Mars (which I recently praised for the 47th time at least) has taken over as "show runner" since that first episode was made, and so it's not unreasonable to think that maybe the dialogue could get more real and more witty a few episodes down the road when his influence kicks in.

And yet, despite the fact that it now means four people I like are associated with show, I just can't make it from here to there. It was that bad, trying to watch that first episode. So I'm out.

Then, Friday night brought Moonlight to CBS. This is the story of a moral vampire working as a private investigator in Los Angeles to fight crime and evil-doers. So, you know, the exact premise of Angel. Only with less good.

Let me just start by saying that where "supernatural" tales are concerned, I pretty much hate it when the writers depart too far from conventional lore. It seems like almost every time a writer deals with vampires, they throw at least one bit of the legend out the window. "Oh, my vampires aren't repelled by crosses." "Yeah, they're totally like vampires, only they don't need permission to enter your house." "Yes, sunlight kills them, but if they put on sunblock, they're just fine."

The way I see it, okay, give the writer one, maybe two cheats. (Except that last example, which was a ridiculous bit of nonsense from the frakking awful movie Blade.) But I say if you're going to deviate any more than that, then you're trying to have your cake and eat it too. You want people to watch your show or read your book or whatever by drawing them in to "ooo, vampires!" But you're totally cheating, because your vampires really aren't vampire-like. You've got to take the bad with the good, I say.

Well, in Moonlight, not only do we learn these vampires aren't repelled by crosses and don't need permission to enter private places, they ALSO aren't affected by garlic, and a stake through the heart won't actually kill them. Oh, AND forget sunblock -- they're just flat out able to spend limited amounts of time in the sun.

So... they're pretty much not vampires. And he tells us all this in a very shoddily written monologue spoken straight to the camera in the opening 30 seconds of the show.

Which just leaves us with a private detective with superpowers... and ham-fisted, badly written film noir style dialogue, spoon-feeding us a boring and predictable plot.

Once again, a bad new show tried to tempt me to overlook its flaws by dangling another Veronica Mars-related carrot in front of me, by having one of the regulars from VM in its cast. But the price was too high. Anyone watching Moonlight should be watching Angel on DVD instead. No excuses.