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TV Reviews: Arrow and Beauty & The Beast
I think I've seen all the fall season premiere's now. Or the dramatic ones at any rate.
Still have Neighbors on the DVR. Not bothering with the other new sitcoms, since Sitcoms aren't really my cup of coco as it were.
1. Beauty and The Beast - upfront they tell us that this is based on the 1987 series by Ron Koslow.
That series starred Linda Hamilton as an assistant DA and Ron Pearlman as The Beast.
It was more mythological and fantasy oriented than the current version. And in some respects a lot more entertaining, [and this is coming from someone who rarely watched it and was not much of a fan. My mother was into it. I was in College and too frigging busy in the evenings to watch tv (not that I had one outside of the dorm lounge). Only saw the reruns whenever I made it home for the holidays or summer break. I watched very little tv in college. Television shows that aired between 1985-1989 tend to be a blur.] But I saw enough of the original to be annoyed by the updated changes. For one thing in the original, you could tell the characters apart better, people looked less alike. But in the updated version we do have more minority and persons of color in the cast. So there is that at least. Also here the beast is more like the Incredible Hulk. He's only a beast when he gets upset, otherwise he looks really hunky and normal. In the original he looked like a beast 24/7, which provided more conflict. Also in this he's a beast due to a government "super-solider" experiment not because he happened to be born that way. So the new version is more cheesy comic book style sci-fi, while the original had a modern fairy tale element to it.
The original version only lasted three seasons in part because Linda Hamilton wanted out halfway through. The series was mainly a romance between Linda Hamilton's Catherine and Vincent. Unlike the updated version - there was no focus in finding an antidote or fixing Vincent. Instead it was hunting the beauty within the beast-like exterior, to see beyond the surface. In addition, Catherine is almost killed in Central Park, Vincent brings her to the city underworld, where he nurses her back to health along with the other out-casts.
She returns to the above ground world determined to find her attacker and leaves her father's cushy law firm for the Prosecutor's office. In subsequent episodes, Katherine investigates the world under the city and becomes the outcastes helper and closer to Vincent. It's worth noting that this is one of the series that George RR Martin helped create and wrote extensively for.
In the new version, Katherine is saved by Vincent Keller ( a former doctor who signed up for a tour of duty with Iraq after 9/11) approximately 9 years ago or when she was still in college and working at a restaurant. She's called her Mom out to help start her car. They start it. A group of men show up and kill her mother in front of her. She flees into the woods, they follow, Vincent pops out of nowhere and mysteriously saves her. But she doesn't really see him, just a beast slashing through these men and killing them. 9 years later, she's a police detective working with NYPD. And Vincent's fingerprints show up on a murder victim. One problem, Vincent is dead or so they believe. Katherine is reunited with Vincent, when he once again saves her life from the government agents seeking to kill him and everything to do with the super-solider project (which her mother was possibly involved with.) There's a B Crime of The Week subplot, but so little attention is paid to it that it hardly matters.
If you knew about the original or liked it at all or found it interesting? Skip this. It will most likely annoy you.
Not gripping. Sort of silly. And yes, you've seen it done before and far better with Dark Angel amongst others. That said the acting is okay, and it is well shot. I've seen worse.
And the premise isn't as laughable as Last Resort.
Overall Grade? C+
2. Arrow. Next to Nashville this is the best pilot I've seen for the American Television Season. Considering the competition this isn't saying very much. Unlike Last Resort and Revolution, Arrow is up front about being an adult comic book. It's not pretending to be anything else. Also while cheesy in places, overall, it's quite fun and doesn't take itself too seriously.
The creator is Greg Berlanti who wrote the summer series "Political Animals". Like Animals, the pilot is fairly well paced and has various subplots. In some respects I like Arrow better than Smallville, it's less "earnest" and high school. Arrow is allowed to kill people and is depicted as a vigilante much in the same style as Bruce Wayne's Batman.
But the back-story is different from both Batman's and Smallville, in that here only Queen's Dad died, Mom lived on and got remarried. And there's a definite "Hamlet" feel to the mix. Berlanti clearly has been reading or watching Shakespear's Hamlet over the summer. There's all sorts of double-dealing, and the female characters are sharp, if difficult to tell apart. Both Beauty and The Beast and Arrow suffer from Hollywood's tendency to only cast 5'4, 90 pound, small-boned, long-haired, brunettes and blonds. Seriously, can't you find anyone else? Smallville did a better job. That said, Arrow's Oliver Queen is a hell of a lot more believable in the role than Smallville's. As is Arrow itself.
Overall the casting isn't bad. My fave, Paul Blackthorne, has popped up again as the father of the hero's ex-girlfriend and the cop hot on Green Arrow's trail. In short, he's Arrow's good-guy nemesis. And he has an understandable bone to pick with Oliver Queen - his other daughter Sarah was on the boat with Queen and lost at sea, while Queen survived.
Apparently Oliver and Sara were cheating on her sister, Lauren, Queen's girl-friend at the time. Lauren, not a saint herself, was sleeping with Queen's best bud Tom Merlin. (Berlanti's hand is seen at work here.) The interpersonal relationships are a tad complicated and we've only just begun.
Susannah Thompson plays Queen's mother, who has her Queen Gertrude cap on. Did she off her hubby? Did she try to off her son? Why did she have her son abducted mere weeks after his return? Not only abducted but tortured in order to find out what he knows? Meanwhile we find out she's married to her hubby's old business partner Walter Hill, who I assumed was the bad-guy and the one who abducted Queen, but no, that was Mamma. Nice twist. That I did not predict. So jury is still out onClaudius Hill.
Meanwhile we have Lauren who is a legal aid attorney hunting down evil in the City. (I'm guessing she'll turn out to be The Black Canary down the road.) She's not happy with Oliver. Blames him for what happened to her sister. And how he treated her. He tells her to stay far away from him now - that he's even worse for her now than he was before (ah shades of Bruce Wayne). She is intrigued by his honesty, all of a sudden. In flashbacks we've seen what an ass he is. The actress playing Lauren isn't bad. But doesn't stand out much either. Her father, Paul Blackthorn, currently has all the best lines and is doing most of the heavy lifting.
Overall it is rather fun. And believable. [ETA: Or rather it didn't hurt my brain to suspend disbelief on this one while it did on Revolution and Last Resort. It really helps if you let me know you are a comic book show to begin with.] Queen spent 5 years on a hellish island in the middle of the China Sea. During that period he thought off pirates of various nationalities, and other problems. He's honed himself into a weapon. Through flashbacks we see what happened at sea and on the island. The series starts with his rescue by an Mandarin fishing boat. And it ends with his take down of a bonds trader. In between he builds his lair, reunites with his family and friends, ditches the body guard his mother saddled him with ostensibly to protect him (more like spy or as he puts it baby-sit), and
crosses off people on the list of bad-guys provided by dear old Dad.
In the flashbacks, we're shown what happened with Dear Old Dad (played by Jamey Sheridan)
on the life-raft in the Pacific. Dad tells his son that he's not a good man. That he's done horrible things. To prove his point he kills the other man in the raft. Insists his son survive and redeem them both when he returns to civilization, then shoots himself in the head in front of Oliver. Talk about traumatic endings. Bruce Wayne had it better.
Oliver is now left in the middle of nowhere, headed towards a cold nasty island, with a list of names, and his father's confession as company. The man who gets rescued is needless to say not the boy lost at sea. The playboy he once was has been kicked out of him. What he did to Sarah and Lauren haunts him. (He was basically sleeping with Sarah on the boat, saying Lauren needn't find out...while a hurricane hit, telling her they'd be fine - only to have her washed out of his arms to sea. )
From what I've read, flashbacks to the island will spatter most of the first season.
Which again reminds me of Political Animals. Berlanti played with flashbacks in that series as well.
In some respects, Arrow feels like a more comic book/action oriented version of the series "Revenge". Each week he goes after a new target. Exacting vengeance and redeeming his father's name at the same time. It's a dark series. Queen's methods aren't exactly nice.
And he's definitely cast in the role of vigilante. But it is also fun. Not perfect, but definitely better than most of the premiers I've seen to date.
I'll stick around for five-six episodes to see where its going.
Overall rating? B/B+
Still have Neighbors on the DVR. Not bothering with the other new sitcoms, since Sitcoms aren't really my cup of coco as it were.
1. Beauty and The Beast - upfront they tell us that this is based on the 1987 series by Ron Koslow.
That series starred Linda Hamilton as an assistant DA and Ron Pearlman as The Beast.
It was more mythological and fantasy oriented than the current version. And in some respects a lot more entertaining, [and this is coming from someone who rarely watched it and was not much of a fan. My mother was into it. I was in College and too frigging busy in the evenings to watch tv (not that I had one outside of the dorm lounge). Only saw the reruns whenever I made it home for the holidays or summer break. I watched very little tv in college. Television shows that aired between 1985-1989 tend to be a blur.] But I saw enough of the original to be annoyed by the updated changes. For one thing in the original, you could tell the characters apart better, people looked less alike. But in the updated version we do have more minority and persons of color in the cast. So there is that at least. Also here the beast is more like the Incredible Hulk. He's only a beast when he gets upset, otherwise he looks really hunky and normal. In the original he looked like a beast 24/7, which provided more conflict. Also in this he's a beast due to a government "super-solider" experiment not because he happened to be born that way. So the new version is more cheesy comic book style sci-fi, while the original had a modern fairy tale element to it.
The original version only lasted three seasons in part because Linda Hamilton wanted out halfway through. The series was mainly a romance between Linda Hamilton's Catherine and Vincent. Unlike the updated version - there was no focus in finding an antidote or fixing Vincent. Instead it was hunting the beauty within the beast-like exterior, to see beyond the surface. In addition, Catherine is almost killed in Central Park, Vincent brings her to the city underworld, where he nurses her back to health along with the other out-casts.
She returns to the above ground world determined to find her attacker and leaves her father's cushy law firm for the Prosecutor's office. In subsequent episodes, Katherine investigates the world under the city and becomes the outcastes helper and closer to Vincent. It's worth noting that this is one of the series that George RR Martin helped create and wrote extensively for.
In the new version, Katherine is saved by Vincent Keller ( a former doctor who signed up for a tour of duty with Iraq after 9/11) approximately 9 years ago or when she was still in college and working at a restaurant. She's called her Mom out to help start her car. They start it. A group of men show up and kill her mother in front of her. She flees into the woods, they follow, Vincent pops out of nowhere and mysteriously saves her. But she doesn't really see him, just a beast slashing through these men and killing them. 9 years later, she's a police detective working with NYPD. And Vincent's fingerprints show up on a murder victim. One problem, Vincent is dead or so they believe. Katherine is reunited with Vincent, when he once again saves her life from the government agents seeking to kill him and everything to do with the super-solider project (which her mother was possibly involved with.) There's a B Crime of The Week subplot, but so little attention is paid to it that it hardly matters.
If you knew about the original or liked it at all or found it interesting? Skip this. It will most likely annoy you.
Not gripping. Sort of silly. And yes, you've seen it done before and far better with Dark Angel amongst others. That said the acting is okay, and it is well shot. I've seen worse.
And the premise isn't as laughable as Last Resort.
Overall Grade? C+
2. Arrow. Next to Nashville this is the best pilot I've seen for the American Television Season. Considering the competition this isn't saying very much. Unlike Last Resort and Revolution, Arrow is up front about being an adult comic book. It's not pretending to be anything else. Also while cheesy in places, overall, it's quite fun and doesn't take itself too seriously.
The creator is Greg Berlanti who wrote the summer series "Political Animals". Like Animals, the pilot is fairly well paced and has various subplots. In some respects I like Arrow better than Smallville, it's less "earnest" and high school. Arrow is allowed to kill people and is depicted as a vigilante much in the same style as Bruce Wayne's Batman.
But the back-story is different from both Batman's and Smallville, in that here only Queen's Dad died, Mom lived on and got remarried. And there's a definite "Hamlet" feel to the mix. Berlanti clearly has been reading or watching Shakespear's Hamlet over the summer. There's all sorts of double-dealing, and the female characters are sharp, if difficult to tell apart. Both Beauty and The Beast and Arrow suffer from Hollywood's tendency to only cast 5'4, 90 pound, small-boned, long-haired, brunettes and blonds. Seriously, can't you find anyone else? Smallville did a better job. That said, Arrow's Oliver Queen is a hell of a lot more believable in the role than Smallville's. As is Arrow itself.
Overall the casting isn't bad. My fave, Paul Blackthorne, has popped up again as the father of the hero's ex-girlfriend and the cop hot on Green Arrow's trail. In short, he's Arrow's good-guy nemesis. And he has an understandable bone to pick with Oliver Queen - his other daughter Sarah was on the boat with Queen and lost at sea, while Queen survived.
Apparently Oliver and Sara were cheating on her sister, Lauren, Queen's girl-friend at the time. Lauren, not a saint herself, was sleeping with Queen's best bud Tom Merlin. (Berlanti's hand is seen at work here.) The interpersonal relationships are a tad complicated and we've only just begun.
Susannah Thompson plays Queen's mother, who has her Queen Gertrude cap on. Did she off her hubby? Did she try to off her son? Why did she have her son abducted mere weeks after his return? Not only abducted but tortured in order to find out what he knows? Meanwhile we find out she's married to her hubby's old business partner Walter Hill, who I assumed was the bad-guy and the one who abducted Queen, but no, that was Mamma. Nice twist. That I did not predict. So jury is still out on
Meanwhile we have Lauren who is a legal aid attorney hunting down evil in the City. (I'm guessing she'll turn out to be The Black Canary down the road.) She's not happy with Oliver. Blames him for what happened to her sister. And how he treated her. He tells her to stay far away from him now - that he's even worse for her now than he was before (ah shades of Bruce Wayne). She is intrigued by his honesty, all of a sudden. In flashbacks we've seen what an ass he is. The actress playing Lauren isn't bad. But doesn't stand out much either. Her father, Paul Blackthorn, currently has all the best lines and is doing most of the heavy lifting.
Overall it is rather fun. And believable. [ETA: Or rather it didn't hurt my brain to suspend disbelief on this one while it did on Revolution and Last Resort. It really helps if you let me know you are a comic book show to begin with.] Queen spent 5 years on a hellish island in the middle of the China Sea. During that period he thought off pirates of various nationalities, and other problems. He's honed himself into a weapon. Through flashbacks we see what happened at sea and on the island. The series starts with his rescue by an Mandarin fishing boat. And it ends with his take down of a bonds trader. In between he builds his lair, reunites with his family and friends, ditches the body guard his mother saddled him with ostensibly to protect him (more like spy or as he puts it baby-sit), and
crosses off people on the list of bad-guys provided by dear old Dad.
In the flashbacks, we're shown what happened with Dear Old Dad (played by Jamey Sheridan)
on the life-raft in the Pacific. Dad tells his son that he's not a good man. That he's done horrible things. To prove his point he kills the other man in the raft. Insists his son survive and redeem them both when he returns to civilization, then shoots himself in the head in front of Oliver. Talk about traumatic endings. Bruce Wayne had it better.
Oliver is now left in the middle of nowhere, headed towards a cold nasty island, with a list of names, and his father's confession as company. The man who gets rescued is needless to say not the boy lost at sea. The playboy he once was has been kicked out of him. What he did to Sarah and Lauren haunts him. (He was basically sleeping with Sarah on the boat, saying Lauren needn't find out...while a hurricane hit, telling her they'd be fine - only to have her washed out of his arms to sea. )
From what I've read, flashbacks to the island will spatter most of the first season.
Which again reminds me of Political Animals. Berlanti played with flashbacks in that series as well.
In some respects, Arrow feels like a more comic book/action oriented version of the series "Revenge". Each week he goes after a new target. Exacting vengeance and redeeming his father's name at the same time. It's a dark series. Queen's methods aren't exactly nice.
And he's definitely cast in the role of vigilante. But it is also fun. Not perfect, but definitely better than most of the premiers I've seen to date.
I'll stick around for five-six episodes to see where its going.
Overall rating? B/B+
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crosses off people on the list of bad-guys provided by dear old Dad.
It was fun although pretty darn unbelievable. And yes, definitely a "Hamlet" vibe to everything.
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In comparison to Chicago Fire and Nashville, not so much.
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There's a B Crime of The Week subplot, but so little attention is paid to it that it hardly matters.
Indeed! I couldn't believe that they just recycled the crime that Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson solved in the second episode of "The Closer" in June 2005 (the wife killed by poison absorbed through her scalp, because the cheating husband told ALL of his women that only a non-existent pre-nup stood between them and happiness, instead of admitting that he loved his wife and had no intention of leaving her in spite of his cheating, and a pregnant girlfriend decided to remove the supposed obstacle by killing the wife).
Talk about 'phoning it in'!
Best thing I could say about it was that I didn't find Kristin Kreuk (Kat) nearly as annoying as I'd expected (I was never a fan of her character Lana Lang on "Smallville", and I find it hard to separate the actress from that role), and she was surprisingly convincing kicking ass on the subway platform.
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Agree on Kristen Kruek, she's actually not bad in this. She was pretty good in the latter half of Smallville, when she stopped playing damsel and got to kick ass. They wrote her out just when she got interesting.
The last three seasons of Smallville, oddly, were amongst the best.
Not a good pilot.
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That really sums it up for me, too! Arrow's one I will watch.
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It wasn't an amazing pilot, but I was at least intrigued; I'm willing to watch the next few episodes and see how things go.
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People had similar issues with the flashbacks in Political Animals. Here it was less confusing, because at least in the flashbacks they were at sea and Oliver looked very different. In Political Animals you couldn't quite tell when you were half the time.
Agreed, not an amazing pilot, but at least I'm intrigued. Probably helps that nothing is on opposite it, and I know zip about the Green Arrow. Never read those comics and outside of Smallville and bits and pieces of the Justice League Cartoons - know zip about him.
This pilot season has been abysmal.
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Beauty and the Beast Take II bored me, so won't be sticking with it.
(Wasn't really a fan of the first one.) Not a fan of the lead.
Arrow on the other hand ...did interest me, as do the spoilers for up-coming episodes, including a teaser with John Barrowmen of Doctor Who and Torchwood fame. But this is mainly because I'm curious about the Green Arrow...he's one of the few super-heros that I know zip about.
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