It's called Demons and, to be honest, it's not terrible. Sure, it's got an eyecandy (male) lead, a besotted hanger-on, and an older man watching over them. Sure, the first episode had a guest star as the villain of the piece. It's not a complete rip-off, though.
Demons is very proud to be set in London... It namedrops several location, and offers some nice tourist shots, but it paints a far more contemporary picture of the city than most fiction designed for the export market (and I have no doubt that they want to sell it in the States).
Strangely, though, one of the main characters in an American played by an English actor... a neat counterpoint to Tony Head's Giles from Buffy, or a gratuitous 'way in' for potential American viewers. Not too sure yet.
It plays about the the Dracula myth in that some of its characters are referred to as being of the family Van Helsing, and even goes so far as to feature another character from an "illustrious family", Mina Harker. Considering her age, I don't think she's Johnathan Harker's wife.
Bizarrely, she's introduced as a blind pianist but, as followers of the genre will know, 'Blind' just means her eyes don't work... she sees by other means, and sees far clearer than the rest of us (pointing out that the besotted-hanger on wants to be more than just a friend, when I had erroneously assumed she was the girlfriend already).
The villain of the piece (with a typically ridiculous Brit-monster name) was played by Mackenzie Crook, styling himself so closely after a character played by one of his Pirates of the Caribbean co-stars, that I half expected him to introduce himself as Captain Jack Sparrow.
Some of the dialogue was pretty good, but a lot of the time I got the impression the writers were trying to go somewhere but not quite managing. Mina's frosty reception for the 'not-girlfriend', followed by her assertion that she didn't dislike her, she just didn't know her being a prime example. It was also quite jarring that, when the main character asked about vampires and werewolves, his mentor claimed "we don't name them, we just rate them and smite them". If everything is going to be referred to as an "entity from the half life" it's going to get a bit repetitive.
Overall, though, there was little technically wrong with it (apart from apparently killing off the first episode's guest star and main player), it simply lacked the polish and style of its model. Better than other efforts (particularly anything attempted by the BBC), but still lacking something in the writing and direction. The special effects were more than competent, except that where Buffy always gave the impression that its dissolving vampires had mass, the monsters in Demons seem to burn up as if they were made from paper.
In other news, I stayed over at the flat on Friday night, cooked myself some dinner (well, heated a pie in the oven and microwaved some veg), had a good night's sleep, and managed to finish painting the base coat in the kitchen on Saturday. With a smaller roller, the remaining work took me about an hour and a half at most, so perhaps I should have started with that in the first place, rather than trying to cover more ground at once with the larger roller.
After that, I spent the rest of the afternoon larking about on my Sega Saturn - neglected for far too long because the TV is almost constantly occupied at my parents' house, or because I'm more usually surfing the net while I'm there. Since I now have the old family TV, I took full advantage of its Cathode Ray Tube to play some lightgun games (House of the Dead - it seems impossible that its 1998 setting was the future when it came out), Virtua Cop 1 and 2) before settling down to play Shining the Holy Ark, and discovering that I'd missed most of an entire map when I last played it years ago. I've made quite a bit of progress, it seems.
There's a fair bit of other writing I'd like to get done - tiny additions or changes to stuff I have in progress for the most part - but not much inclination to do it... So, while I'm on a slightly more even keel that I was on Friday, I'm still not as focussed as I'd like.
We shall see. Maybe I'll surprise myself.
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