Battlestar Galactica (1978) storyboard
Category: TV
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I Am the Night mini-series premiere ⭐
I was really looking forward to the new TNT series I Am the Night. The series, about the infamous Black Dahlia murder from the perspective of the 1960s, looked to be in the vein of a James Ellroy novel like L.A. Confidential. Unfortunately, I Am the Night isn’t even James Ellroy-ish and after the first episode I’m not quite sold on the series yet.
In the show, Chris Pine stars as Jay Singletary, a disgraced newspaper reporter who because of a story he wrote in the past was blackballed and now is forced to take pictures of philandering celebrities and murdered corpses in morgues in order to make ends meet. India Eisley is Pat, a biracial teenager living with her African American mother in a segregated Nevada town who learns that she’s actually white and adopted when she stumbles across her birth certificate. As Pat contacts her grandfather in Los Angeles and then decides to travel there to meet him, she discovers that things might not be copacetic when she tries contacting him but is told by the woman who answers the phone to stay away since her grandpa is a very dangerous man.
And that was pretty much it.
I got the feeling that I Am the Night is being treated more as a show people are supposed to binge watch rather than a traditional cable drama. Bingeable shows can have whole episodes where not too much story happens other than we learn about the characters since there’s always another episode ready to go in the queue next. Network shows with their weeklong delay between episodes do not. I almost felt like that first episode of I Am the Night could probably be removed entirely from the series with whatever backstory needed for the characters sprinkled throughout the series. Isn’t it more interesting to discover a character you thought you knew after a few episodes is completely different when something unique about them is revealed at some point later in the season? Isn’t that better than stuffing the first episode full of backstory for characters we haven’t had time to care about yet?
Now the six episode mini-series I Am the Night might morph into something really interesting and good, I just wonder how many episodes it’s going to take in order to get there?
The Passage season 1 premiere ⭐⭐
The new FOX TV series The Passage has a long and interesting history to the small screen. Based on the novel of the same name by Justin Cronin, originally the pilot episode of The Passage TV show was shot the summer of 2017 with an eye to be on the schedule later that fall. But FOX didn’t like what they saw and instead of cancelling the series outright sent it back to the drawing board as it were, replacing actors and reshooting the episode in early 2018. And this time they must’ve liked the result since the show is now the hub of FOX’s winter schedule.
While the series is based on the novel The Passage, the TV series does take quite a few liberties with the story. The novel is told in several time periods, the first present day where the vampires are just starting to be active and another nearly 100 years in the future where the fanged ones have taken over, driving what’s left of humanity into protective enclaves. While the TV series does focus on the part of the book that takes place present day, gone, or at least not present in the first episode, is everything else.
I left the first episode thinking that half of it was really interesting, but that the other half was pure crud.
In the TV The Passage, scientists have found what essentially turns out to be a vampire in South America and, after one of their group is attacked and turned, locks this dude up and begins studying him. In something that’s a stretch for even a horror series like The Passage, these same scientists find out that being a vampire makes you immune from all diseases, and that if they can figure it out they can make regular non-blood drinking people immune from everything too. But the scientists find that keeping people from fully turning into vampires is a lot harder than it looks and want to try the process on a child, because a child has more “something or others” than a fully grown adult.
And this is the interesting part.
The not so interesting part involves Brad Wolgast (Mark-Paul Gosselaar), an ex-CIA-Green Beret-Navy Seal-Special Forces type sent out to pick up an orphan and bring her back to the testing facility since there’s a virulent form of bird-flu about to descent on the US which will surly kill thousands unless the scientists can crack the vampire code. Wolgast picks up this girl, played by an amazing Saniyya Sidney who hopefully one day will be in something better than this, but quickly finds that he can’t go through with it and the two go on the run ala Bruce Banner in The Incredible Hulk.
I thought the idea of scientists studying vampires in a lab not realizing that the blood-suckers are psychically linked with each other, and are secretly infecting the dreams of the scientists at night, was actually pretty great. That alone would make a good series. The second part with Wolgast on the run was ridiculous. Like all the scientists need is a kid to run their experiments, and if Wolgast is on the run why not just find another kid?
Just as insane is the idea that the scientists are going to turn vampirism into a cure for anything since 100% of the time everyone they’ve tried it on has turned into a vampire. It seems like you’d want to do a lot more testing with something that has the ability to wipe out the human race that they are in The Passage.
What I wanted out of The Passage was either I Am Legend before everyone on the planet got turned into vampires or what Fear the Walking Dead should have been rather than what it turned out to be. But so far it’s turned out to be mostly network TV drama schlock.
I’ll give this one a few more episodes but have to admit that things aren’t looking too good for me and The Passage.
The Punisher season 2 premiere ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Let me be what I’m meant to be
It’s only been a little more than a year since Netflix released new episodes of the series The Punisher, yet somehow it feels much longer.
When we last left Frank Castle/The Punisher (Jon Bernthal) in the first season, he had gotten vengeance on those who had killed his family and had gotten a sort of free pass from the authorities on everything he’d done since he’d taken out some very bad people. The second season starts a year or two later with Frank traveling the country and ending up in Michigan where he finds a connection with Beth Quinn (Alexa Davalos) a bartender. But because The Punisher is, well, The Punisher things go bad one night and Frank winds up taking on a half-dozen or so trained killers out to kidnap a girl named Amy Bendix (Giorgia Whigham). Beth takes a bullet in the melee and Frank and Amy go on the run since Frank isn’t about to leave her vulnerable and alone and that’s pretty much the first episode.
There’s been quite a few attempts at “cracking” the character of the Punisher outside of the comics the last few decades, none of which we even able to get at the core of the character nor were too successful. It’s ironic, then, that the one place that was finally able to deliver a Punisher I’d recognize from the comics was Netflix rather than the big screen. Always before Netflix he was too broadly drawn or the story was too far removed from what made him work in the comics, but other than updating a few things here and there the Punisher on Netflix is pretty much the Punisher from the comics.
With one exception.
Usually, the comic version of the Punisher is like the Energize Bunny, he keeps going and going. He never quits and there’s always one more bad guy out there he needs to confront in the next issue. What was so interesting with the Netflix Punisher was that at the end of the first season his job is complete, the people who killed his family are dead so his job was finished. This Punisher had a focused set of goals, and when they were done his job was done.
So what was next? Well, ex-Marine/ex-Punisher Frank like a lot of vets wasn’t sure. After all he’s been through what’s he supposed to do? Get a job at the grocery? Go work at a factory? Instead, Frank chose to travel the US, but rather than on the back of a Harley like so many people do he chose to see the country via a van. While you can stay ahead of your problems for a while when you roam like that, your problems are always there as Frank discovers.
Here, it’s not so much there are still people out to get him since most of them are either dead or under the impression that he’s dead, Frank’s problem is that he can’t keep out of a fight no matter what the consequences. And the consequence here are that Frank loses the one chance he has at happiness since the death of his family to be with Beth.
Which is what I’d kind’a expect in a series called The Punisher. We don’t tune in to see Frank Castle happy and content. We tune in to see him brooding, and going after the bad people.
Side note — I was very happy to see Bernthal reunited with Davalos here. They played star-crossed lovers too in the mostly unseen TNT Mob City series of a few years back. That show by Frank Darabont had Bernthal as 1950s LA police detective Joe Teague with Davalos playing Teague’s vampy girlfriend Jasmine Fontaine.