Customer Reviews

No Such Thing as Vampires

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I'm not prone to vampire stories although I do see the appeal but this show was brought to my attention by fellow Beauty and the Beast fans. I went online and watched the Pilot and was hooked almost immediately. This show is action filled but with comedy and romance. Alex O'Loughlin does a superb job playing Mick St. John. His beautiful co-star, his vampire buddy and his friend at the morgue add many different views to the show. I hope this show continues for many years to come. It's been a pleasure viewing it and I wait anxiuosly each week for a new ep. :-)

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 decision-making. They're still vampire shows, and that will result in some people dismissing them outright -- just as some people dismiss science fiction as not "serious" literature. But as Battlestar Galactica fans know, it's not the genre that defines the shows, it's the characters and what they do in the extreme situations they're thrown into that makes for compelling television.

From that perspective, this early episode of Moonlight is not compelling at all, and neither is the second. But the show is coming along, it is definitely coming along.

Watch this first episode, "No Such Thing As Vampires," and the second Moonlight episode, as the contrived set-ups they are for the seven following (more entertaining and less contrived) episodes.

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.

I was really anticipating this show and it didn't disappoint! It has an intriguing back-story and enticing scenes that make you want to know more. I found myself really looking forward to the next episode, and it keeps getting better! I'm hooked!

The first of a great show. Just the begining of what will be a great love. I highly recommend the entire series

I watched this show merely cause it was there and was pleasantly surprised. I assumed it was going to be just another vampire vigilante show, but after 1 episode I found myself anxious to see what happened to these people. The new twist to what hurts vampires was a bit annoying, but is definitely worth seeing.

This is a review for Amazon Instant Video on Moonlight. Compared to the series, you do not miss much here when it is this or DVD. You have some extras but they are not that much or that often, and they are normally interviews and nothing more. For that reason, i think it works out.

Moonlight is a story about Mick St. James and a human he has a past with. In the pilot there is a "vsaampire killing" case Mick looks into, and this is something that Mick finds dangerous. Apparently vampires have their way of living and concealing, and they do not like attention. This rleationshiip continues on through the show, and this and another one will come to define it.

As far as a show on the supernatural, i liked it. It had a lot and it even allowed people to do things that a lot of shows seem to miss out on. The efffects, while not amazing, are great, and the acting was a lot better than anything I expected. Honestly, i thought the show might scream timber and fall a few episodes in but it kept the season going and it answers a lot. We get to know Mick, vamps, some humans, an a weird experiment that is going on.

Its worth watching.

As with all shows, there are filler episodes as well. That can be one of the great things about this, because you do not have to wathc everything. Still, missing is missing and this, a 5/5 show that is still hanging around, might find you enjoying it.

It is hard not to.

Moonlight is a wonderful series with a lot going for it. I hope another station will pick this series up soon! The Vamps/Romance/Action/Witty....the best show out in a long time. Actors Alex/Sophia/Jason & extras are all wonderful.

First, the Amazon VOD aspect:

I use the Roku box to access this series, and thus far Amazon has been excellent. In fact, I keep my series DVDs in their container - I use VOD to watch. ::hopes to get Supernatural for Christmas::

That said, now the series itself.

I've stated this before and it bears repeating - NOTHING is new. PERIOD. What makes a show special is in how all the elements are blended, and if there is a spin or twist on a theme to freshen it, whether the characters move you. Joseph Campbell essentially said so - and he was something of an expert on story telling. ;)

To be clear, I am not by and large a "fan" of vampire genre. Just being about vampires is not enough to get my attention or hold my interest. First and foremost are the characters. If a show's characters are flat, emotionally unengaging, stupid, badly written... there is no point in watching. Mick St. John, Beth Turner (and the achingly slow, very believable building of their relationship, including setbacks, disagreements, etc.), the snarky and amazing Josef Kostan, the geeky Ryder England and Logan Griffin - each one a very distinctive character with well-formed personalities. The dialog, especially the banter between the regular characters, is crisp, smart and funny.

And, this show has something else going for it that is quite rare. Of all the vamp shows currently on the air, none of them, IMHO, manages to fully flesh out vampires as "people", or make them believable in the modern world. Moonlight vampires come across as "realistic" (quotes because after all this is a fantasy show). Their powers make sense, and as Mick St. John quips, they are not Superman. They can be injured (though they heal), and they can be killed. This built-in vulnerability helps to make them interesting. Vampires in this "vampverse" also hold jobs and have businesses, go out on dates, "grocery shop" (Mick grabbing his blood from Guillermo at the LA County Morgue), form relationships, fall in love... there is something satisfying and even moving about these beings having to do the same things as humans to have a normal life, or their version of it.

The noir detective theme only adds to the appeal - a slick, moody ambiance that folds nicely into the vampire atmosphere.

Bottom line - this show is supremely entertaining and often moving, with characters you will remember and may even think about well after the last episode's end credits. That is the mark of something special.

And now, a semi-rant: regarding complaints about the cases being predictable. This show is not CSI:Vampire (thank god). The detective aspect is just that - an aspect. It is not the show's primary thrust or appeal. Besides this, in the real world, MOST P.I. cases (because Mick St. John is a private investigator, NOT a cop) are mundane. Anyone who knows people in this line of work (or even law enforcement for that matter) is well aware of this. It is unfortunate that most of the sludge on TV makes it seem like every case is or should be stellar and news-worthy. That could explain why I gladly watch this series repeatedly over the acronym-laden drek I refer to collectively as "NCSI50"

I started to watch this show because of Alex O'Loughlin and glad to report I am glad I did. What a great show, yes some of it is predictable, but the characters are great.

It is a shame it only had 1 season, but in a way I am glad. I think Alex O'Loughlin is perfect in Hawaii 5-0.