1 February 2011

[mmerriam]

Hello Hivemind,

I am curious about what currently in broadcast run SF/F television shows you are watching, and which one you think are good. I would like your recommendations, as I plan to watch a few of these shows, request shooting scripts from the production companies, and then write some spec scripts. Thanks.

Comments

[moiread]

I have a lot of days where I'm mostly non-functioning and can't focus enough to read, so I just watch TV and knit. Consequently, I go through a huge number of shows. Here are some of the SF/F ones I can think of off the top of my head and how I felt about them. Your mileage may vary.

True Blood: In my opinion, Season 1 was hit or miss (as you'd expect from a first season), Season 2 was good, and then Season 3 took all the good things and tore them up and took a dump on their fundamental aspects. I'm hoping Season 4 will fix some of what Season 3 broke, but since the show appears to be heading off into Sparkly Faerie Mary Sue territory for the main protagonist (especially in the "must be beer-flavoured nipples" department; everyone and their dog falls hopelessly in love with Sookie despite that she is actually very irrational, hypocritical, and obnoxious most of the time), those hopes are not very high. Still, it did a lot of neat things, and I enjoyed Season 2 immensely!

Fringe: This show frequently does science Very, Very Wrong, and I am actually okay with this! It's not brilliant television, but it's fun and funny and weird and you get to watch John Noble pull off some amazing acting and gorily dissect impossible creates while high on various drugs. They killed off my very favourite character, but the rest alternate between "good" and "not terrible", and even Anna Torv's incredibly blank and wooden performance has improved a lot over the last season! The alternate universe plots this past season have been really very excellent, too. It's a solid entertaining fluff show, for me.

Haven: This is a really predictable, kind of flimsy show, and one of those series where the main premise is a ~big mystery~, but one that takes so long for any clues to drop about it that the amount of agonizing over it all the characters do starts to get really annoying. (If the writers want to see how to effectively mesh "____ of the week" with an overarching plot and keep both interesting, they should go talk to the people writing for The Good Wife, which is not SF/F but nevertheless amazing.) Still, it was a cute little show, and the main characters are very attractive, and I have a lot of time on my hands. So I watched it and will probably continue to do so if/when it returns for another season. At the very least, it's the kind of show where I can think, "I like that idea, but it would be better if they'd done X, Y, and Z." It gives the plot and character muscles in my brain a good work out, and I like that. I've come away from the show with lots of ideas for other things I could write.

No Ordinary Family: I haven't watched past the first handful of episodes because the writing was giving me figurative whiplash. For the first little while, the writers couldn't seem to decide if they were doing a hyuck hyuck cheesy PG family comedy or a gritty, hard-hitting morally realistic superhero drama, and the two vastly different tones were seriously not meshing well. Several of my friends kept with it, though, so I think it may have improved as the writers found their stride. (I hope so. The cast is really, really good, and they deserve something they can work with.)

The Cape: I watched the first two episodes at a friends' place because we wanted to try it out. I found them so painfully, laughably bad that I couldn't cope and wound up mocking the shit out of them on Twitter in a running commentary just for something fun to do while I waited for them to be over. I will not be watching more. Even if it gets better later, I don't think I can make it through more episodes like those to get to it.

Will add more when I think of 'em.

[moiread]

Lost Girl: This is a very silly, very fluffy, very amusing show. It relies a lot on telling rather than showing (the amount of constant exposition is nuts), and it likes to butcher mythology (I am totally down with reinterpreting mythology, or being inspired by mythology, or otherwise doing new and interesting things with it, but this is straight-up ham-handed butchering), and the acting is sometimes hilariously bad, but... I really like it anyway. It almost never takes itself seriously, and the "monster-hunting goth chick who fell down the faerie rabbit hole" urban fantasy premise tickles me deep down in the remaining vestiges of my inner teenager. This is another one of those shows that makes me want to write things, because I keep thinking, "Oh, that's a fun idea! If only they'd done this instead..." There are so, so many things you could do with a show like this.

The Walking Dead: Straight-up fantastic. I loved every minute of it. They did the zombie apocalypse right! So many zombie stories don't bother to research what would actually happen to things like electricity and running water and wildlife regrowth, or how long local gas stations would still have any fuel, or whether or not one could even access that fuel, and it bugs the crap out of me. But this show knew those things, and it made them count! It used them as part of the story! I was so, so happy. So happy. And oh, the rest of the writing was just as excellent. It was funny and touching and gut-wrenching and awful and completely sucked me in. At the end of the pilot, I almost jumped off the bed to go run for my TV and grab it and shake it and beg it to please give me the next episode, please, please! Waiting that week between new installments was positively agonizing.

[mmerriam.livejournal.com]

Lost Girl sounds like a lot of fun. I'll check it out!

[mmerriam.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the detailed write up. Haven and Fringe are on my list of possible shows, though I think I'm going to focus on Eureka, Warehouse 13 and Being Human from the SyFy channel.