19 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
predictable, cliche-ish eye-candy that gets better in later eps, November 23, 2007
This review is from: Moonlight Season 1 (Amazon Instant Video)
First off, I've enjoyed most vampire TV shows over the last two decades, and they've all had some things in common, and they've all had some differences. Most of them steal from the original (Bram Stoker) and all of them have liberally stolen from each other and from literary sources (such as Anne Rice) because vampire canon, such as it is, was limited by the original Stoker Dracula and re-invented imaginatively by Anne Rice. I loved, loved, LOVED Buffy The Vampire Slayer (the TV show, not the movie) because it was such an amazing dramatic TV show, as was its spin-off Angel.
That said, I disagree with most reviewers who've said Moonlight is a rip-off of Buffy or Angel. It is not. The only supernatural beings on Moonlight are the vampires, not the pantheon of assorted trolls, demons, and other evil beings from other dimensions and portals that Buffy and Angel and the Scooby gang so frequently encountered and defeated. Also, the only evils on Moonlight are committed by humans -- and occasionally vampires.
So far the vamp TV show Moonlight most closely resembles is Forever Knight, the short-lived (3 seasons) CBS "Crime Time After Prime Time" early 90s late night show set and shot in Toronto. Mick St. John on Moonlight is not unlike Nick Knight on Forever Knight, in terms of his longing to be human and his angst about the "monster" he perceives himself to be.
Both shows featured the main character in triangulated relationships which provide conveniently built-in emotional tension for character and relationship development, plot devices, and historical flashbacks/backstory. Both shows featured the main male vampire character dancing around his attraction to a beautiful human woman, with both of them knowing that the relationship could never be consummated without danger, death, or some other terrible outcome (the human being "turned" vampire and condemned to a life of darkness and undeath); thus the two are therefore locked in a perpetual state of unresolved sexual tension packed with opportunities for jealous interference in each other's lives (plot device), and only half-heartedly able to pursue romantic attachments with truly available partners of the same, er, species (living or undead) (also plot devices). And, like Nick Knight, Mick St. John prefers not to drink (eat) humans -- but where Nick Knight made do with cow blood, Mick St. John subsists on human donor blood. Moonlight, in those respects, is formulaically quite similar to Forever Knight. (After this point, there are SPOILERS, so you may want to stop reading now...)
However, there are some clever differences: Forever Knight's big, bad sire vampire LaCroix, who used female vampire protege Janette to lure Nick into accepting his "gift" of eternal life (and provided and amplified the delightful homoeroticism of the mentor/protege possessor/possessed relationship) has been replaced by Coraline. Coraline is Mick St. John's ex-wife and sire on Moonlight -- an apparently evil female vampire who'd lived some 500 years, sired Mick (made him a vampire) on their wedding night (in 1952), and enmeshed him in an obsessive, addictive relationship from which he tried to break free many times but usually couldn't. He never wanted to be a vampire -- he didn't even know she was one when they married. She made him a vampire against his will, without asking him or getting his permission. Now, of course, he has "trust issues." She, from her perspective, gave him a "gift" of eternal life -- freedom from death (sounds familiar -- like LaCroix on Forever Knight!).
Coraline crossed a fatal line, however, when she kidnapped a human girl to make their couplehood a little "family" (sounds familiar, eh? rather like Lestat, Louis, and Claudia in Anne Rice's Interview With The Vampire). Mick, by this time (1982), was using his vampire skills to do good as a private detective (it is implied, though not directly stated, that he "does good" as a PI because he feels guilty about the "bad" he's done as a vampire). It was in this capacity that the girl's mother approached him to find her daughter Beth -- only for Mick to discover that it was his wife Coraline who kidnapped the innocent child in a demented ploy to win him back.
Another re-invention on Moonlight is that wooden stakes don't kill vampires, they just paralyze them. Only beheading and fire kill vampires in the Moonlight universe. Mick, in his PI role in the first episode, finds the distraught mother's little girl, rescues her, stakes his crazy ex-wife/lover/sire Coraline to paralyze her, and sets the place on fire before locking her in. The little girl he rescues is returned intact to her family. Thus begins Mick's distant "relationship" with Beth Turner, who grows up to be a reporter for BuzzWire, a mostly online magazine that's not unlike the tabloid Courtney Cox's character Lucy edits on FX's show Dirt, except it's less celebrity-focused and more local crime story sensationalism. Mick keeps an eye on Beth from afar until a new case in 2007 LA causes their paths to cross again.
In the first episode of Moonlight, "No Such Thing as Vampires," Beth, now grown into a beautiful blond with journalistic ambitions (but news-whore tendencies), winds up working with Mick to track down what may or may not be a vampire killer so she can score a big win with her editor and online readers. Mick works with her so he can both protect her and eliminate this threat to the secret existence of vampires in LA (with strong encouragement from his amoral vampire friend Josef, a 400-some year old vamp played by Jason Dohring, formerly on Veronica Mars).
I didn't watch this episode on CBS. In fact, I didn't watch the first 6 episodes of Moonlight on TV at all -- I watched them on CBS' web site of full video, Innertube. I was intrigued by Alex O'Loughlin's eye-candy good looks, I've always loved the vampire genre, and I dearly loved Jason Dohring's dysfunctional portrayal of Logan Echolls on Veronica Mars, so I knew I wanted to catch the show. But I wasn't about to be seduced by a show that had already had so many rumors of troubled production and bad writing. The first episode was as predicted: stilted dialogue, cliche-ish plot devices, utterly predictable plot and twists.
However, what keeps me watching the show are several things: (1) the show has a beautiful, SoCal corrupt clarity about it, a noir look that is dark, decadent, sexy, and shiny; (2) Alex O'Loughlin just takes over the screen when he's on it because he's got screen presence and, despite the poor material, seems to have a fairly nuanced set of acting skills, including tiny facial movements and slight changes in body position/language, which communicate volumes; (3) Jason Dohring, who provides major competition for O'Loughlin when they share the screen, and plays his amoral, jaded vampire role to the hilt, practically eating up the scenery, and (4) Sophia Myles, who had actual vamp cred prior to Moonlight (in the first Underworld movie) and is herself not a bad piece of eye-candy of the female persuasion, and has some chemistry with O'Loughlin. She also isn't your typical stick-thin, anorexic-looking TV actress; the girl's got a little meat on her bones. So, unlike many of the women on TV, she actually occasionally looks like a "real" woman. Finally, (5) the show manages to have a sense of humor and sarcasm about the city it's set in -- LA -- and the surface-obsessed tendencies of the majority of the people and the business that keep it going.
The first episode, however, was straight out of B-movie (or is that B-TV) hell. I thought, "Eh, that was was pretty; I'll watch the next ep on the web and see if it gets any better." I mainly knew I would come back for Jason Dohring and because O'Loughlin is pretty enough to keep me coming back, too. But I wasn't expecting much from the show based on the first episode. I figured it would be my guilty pleasure, something I'd watch as "webisodes" and not much else.
Surprisingly, it's getting really good. This has a lot to do with improved writing, developing backstory, intersecting relationship triangles, and the growing role of Shannyn Sossamon as Mick's ex-wife and vampire sire Coraline. It's still eye candy, but I don't feel as guilty about watching it -- and now I actually watch it on TV. I even got suckered into buying it via Amazon Unbox. I credit mostly Alex O'Loughlin and Jason Dohring with this. But the most recent episodes (we're up to episode 9 now) have ratcheted up the tension between Beth and Mick, while also increasing the tension between Mick's happily-amoral and happily-non-human friend Josef (Jason Dohring) and the unhappy, secretly self-hating Mick, who longs for a cure for his vampirism, some way to turn human again.
Adding the seductive Coraline (Shannyn Sossamon) in flashbacks to fill out the story of how Mick "went to bed a happily married man and woke up a monster" has only improved the show's "grab" factor. The chemistry between Alex O'Loughlin and Sophia Myles is a nice slow burn, but it truly sizzles with Shannyn Sossamon. And there's a nice metrosexual homoerotic chemistry with Jason Dohring as well. There are some very sexy (though still network-TV-permissible) scenes on later eps and I'm looking forward to upcoming episodes.
Make no mistake: like Angel, Buffy -- and Forever Knight before them, as well as movies like Interview with the Vampire and 30 Days Of Night -- what makes Moonlight, and all vampire TV shows and movies entertaining is not necessarily the vampires. It's that their vampirism allows for extremes of behavior and emotion that dramatize the joys and horrors of being human, and provide a starker backdrop for portraying the sometimes excruciating choices we must make between the lesser of two (or three or four) evils, or when emotion overrules reason in our...
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The best show on TV, November 7, 2007
This review is from: Moonlight Season 1 (Amazon Instant Video)
I an not a TV watcher (seriously), nor a vampire genre lover, but I have fallen hard for this show. I anxiously await each episode, I watch and then rewatch them on my VCR (yeah, I'm old school), I decided to leap into technology and do this video download and I await the DVD release. I have been hypontized by this show.
Alex O'Loughlin's character Mick St. John brings us back to the leading men of old - when they were just the right blend of macho, sexy, soft and sarcastic. And hey, he's pretty darn easy on the eyes. Sophia Myles is breathtaking and full of sass as Beth Turner. She is just like every reporter I have ever known, including myself, and I am delighted by her classic beauty. Together these two are magnetic - they light the screen on fire and their acting is superb.
On top of all that, the writing is witty and playful and the storylines are at the same time compelling, layered, deep and thought-provoking. Each time I rewatch an episode I notice something new.
I pray the writers strike does not doom this masterpiece. It's the first show I've truly loved in more than 10 years. CBS has a winner. I just hope they realize that.
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