Shows I will miss most cont’d:
Reaper
Reaper was a show that I probably had too much hope for because like so many shows I like, I saw a potential in it that was never tapped. And maybe it was never meant to.
It was a tried and true premise but played for witty and strange laughs. And, of course, the one charged with capturing escaped souls from Hell was a ne’er-do-well, unambitious slacker. Luckily he had his very own Ray and Egon in his best friends Sock and Ben.
Ray Wise, though, was the engine that made the show hum. He gave the Devil that oily, car salesman charm that the best incarnations of the Prince of Lies have. This Devil don’t need no Lola.
In hindsight, I can see why I gravitated to the show. It was like a combination Faust and Chuck. Guy’s parents sell his soul to the Devil and he’s a complete slacker at first, but his new role gives him a sense of purpose that he never had. Certainly, like Chuck, he hated it but he learned to see the benefits of his predicament. He could capture souls and make the world safe for the living.
The second season certainly played with Sam’s conflicted life. On the one hand, he was still the Devil’s stooge constantly being undermined and thwarted left and right. On the other hand, much to the Devil’s delight, Sam was getting pretty damn good at his job.
There were a myriad of places the show could have went with this. Sam’s girlfriend, Andi became the Work Bench’s manager. It turned out she was good at the job, but hated the responsibility. I thought it would have been interesting to see that both Sam and Andi
digging the perks of being seen as the Shit instead of just simply shit. How would it change them? Would they start to alienate others? And would they have lost themselves in the process?
Kevin Smith produced the show and you can see it almost as Dogma played out as a series. Funny on the surface but brimming with serious philosophical undertones. It hit the lapsed Catholic in me, so much so that I wrote a spec script. I found out the hard way, much to my chagrin, that a definite tone has to be established for Reaper to work and I went too angsty with mine. But I contend that the show should have went to the angst and who knows maybe it would have gotten there. The finale left a lot of unanswered questions.
And that’s the thing with low rated shows, when the show’s gone more often than not Fanfic is going to supply you with the answers. And more often than not those answers are gonna suck.
Shows that I am ecstatic and shocked about coming back:
Dollhouse
I love Joss Whedon but he is a maddening SOB.
Consider that basically Dollhouse was like a favor to Eliza Dushku as he got a bit Tarantino on his Travoltette. Seriously, Eliza. The New Guy? So he created Dollhouse as an enterprise to bounce back from her first starring vehicle Tru Calling. It certainly has its fans, but Tru ain’t Faith the Vampire Slayer, which is where she will always have a place to many fans of the Whedonverse.
But either through sheer stubbornness or a mild case of amnesia and misremembering himself as Charlie Brown, the greatest kicker of footballs in history, Whedon teamed up with Fox to broadcast the show during the midseason. To run headlong into the alliteration, Fox fucked the show famous for cancellation despite its rabid cult of Brownshirts. I am of course speaking of Fasc…er, Firefly. So you can see how trepidatious his loyal fans were. Thousands of palms slammed hard into thousands of foreheads as word came out.
More bad news. Fox deemed Dollhouse too smart and begged Joss to dumb it down. Joss did, the network learned its lesson after a lukewarm reception, and backed the hell off leaving Whedon to his devices. It was a tall order of a show. First I thought they were robots programmed to be whatever the owner or client wants them to be, and then one of the robots becomes self-aware and wants to discover its true identity. Nice. Cliched, but nice. Then I discovered they were people. Voluntary people. Consensual people who for a hefty sum were asked to forsake their identities, get programmed with a new one, and then become someone’s slave for however long the client wants them. Eliza Dushku played the “active” doll, Echo, who actively gained her independent thought episode by episode. Disturbing. Scary. Intriguing. I couldn’t wait.
Tomorrow: More from in a Dollhouse and a boy named Chuck Bartowski
TallGent
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