Over the last weekend, the TV series based on Marvel Comics/New Line Cinema's Blade franchise started. Visually and stylistically, it's based very closely on the movies, seemingly occurring sometime after the first, but before the second (or, alternatively, denouncing the second).
It's pretty much the average American TV Series Based On A Successful Movie formula... all the usual stereotypes are there, and it introduces the bizarre - yet utterly derivative - concept of a drug for humans, made using vampires - in this case, vampire ash. In common with this theme in just about every other TV series that uses it, this drug grants the user a small portion of the vampire's characteristics - strength, speed... and, wouldn't you know it, the thirst. So much so, in fact, that some users are driven to gnawing off their own fingers for blood.
The action is fairly weak - well, the pilot felt that way... as if they knew they were filming a pilot that probably wouldn't get picked up - and the storyline was terribly unoriginal.
But, I guess, there's not a great deal one can do with a subject like this... Or is there?
It dealt with Blade's history by having his sidekick/weapons guy deliver a lengthy exposition featuring clips from the first movie, and a significant dropping of names - Whistler, specifically. While 'Blade: The Early Years', a teen drama featuring a teenage misfit and his attempts to lead a normal life while dealing with the vampire underbelly would probably have been both less interesting and less original, there was surely a better way to introduce the character to the small percentage of television viewers who were otherwise unaware of the character's existence.
Not least, a plot for the pilot.
Bringing in a soldier recently returned from combat was also decidely unoriginal... but these often seem to be the character we're supposed to root for, and who provides the viewer's way into the story. Add in a dead brother as a family connection to the vampire underbelly (restoring old buildings by day, spreading the vampire ash drug and researching 'cures' for the vampires' weaknesses by night) and the story is barely distinguisable from any other 'maverick/outlaw hero' TV series these days.
Still, I'll give it another go this weekend, and see how it continues its story...
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