Vexed (01x01)
Aug. 15th, 2010 11:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lady_t_220Just finished watching Vexed. (One of Three. What is it with the Beeb making REALLY short series of things right now?)
The RT is scathing in its review, but then that reviewer didn't like Sherlock either so I don't always put a lot of stock in her opinion. It's not like *amazing* or anything but it's certainly watchable enough to pass the time. Though it must be said Toby Stephens is still and probably always will be Mr Rochester to me, and every time I see him not-being-Rochester it always comes as a bit of a weird brain-fart-inducing moment. Though it probably doesn't help that the last time this happened he was painfuly mauling an American accent in Strike Back as an insanely overblown bad-guy beurocrat who was barely an inch from just chewing Andrew Lincoln's head off given the rate at which he was gnawing through the scenery.
But I digress. Comedy-dramas (frequently referred to in the compound term 'dramady', though usually more accurately described by the alternative possible compound form of 'coma') usually suffer with the problem of being both 'not funny enough to be a comedy' and 'too flippant to be a drama', not quite good enough at either to pick a genre and stick to it.
Quite rightly I think this erred more on the comedy side. Something that, IMO, Toby Stephens is actually pretty good at- his ability to play an almost inexplicably likable arsehole is in full plumage throughout. The drama element itself is actually not a drama so much as it's just a slightly inappropriate comedy set within the format of a fairly standard police procedural, and any serious moments of character discovery are fairly swiftly undermined by story threads ultimately hitting a punchline. A little less with the attempts at seriousness would actually have probably gone a long way into pulling it more definitively into a genre and avoiding the dramedy-coma associations. Though to be fair it could have probably done with a little more cynical smarts from other characters in counterpoint to the leads being... well, basically idiots. I think 1982 wanted a couple of its jokes back, the RT and I are in agreement on that point at least, but I feel like that's more a failing of the show not coming off as self-aware enough to know that jokes like those were bad within the context of its own setting.
I'll give it a middling score. I'd like to see the rest of the series, and I would like to think that given a little time and some development it could actually evolve into a sort of... modern-day cynical Moonlighting kind of thing. It's not quite there yet though.
I'd give it a C+ ish. (That's actually a C- for the show, but it gets bonus points just cause I quite like Toby Stephens and he's not on TV enough, darnit.)
Also, semi-relatedly, I've got ask- what is it with the stealth gingers lately? Both Cumberbatch and Stephens err distinctly on the auburn side yet you wouldn't actually know it half the time.
In recognition of which, I'm just gonna' leave this here. I know I've posted it before but that, seemingly, is not going to stop me. *draws sparkly hearts*
The RT is scathing in its review, but then that reviewer didn't like Sherlock either so I don't always put a lot of stock in her opinion. It's not like *amazing* or anything but it's certainly watchable enough to pass the time. Though it must be said Toby Stephens is still and probably always will be Mr Rochester to me, and every time I see him not-being-Rochester it always comes as a bit of a weird brain-fart-inducing moment. Though it probably doesn't help that the last time this happened he was painfuly mauling an American accent in Strike Back as an insanely overblown bad-guy beurocrat who was barely an inch from just chewing Andrew Lincoln's head off given the rate at which he was gnawing through the scenery.
But I digress. Comedy-dramas (frequently referred to in the compound term 'dramady', though usually more accurately described by the alternative possible compound form of 'coma') usually suffer with the problem of being both 'not funny enough to be a comedy' and 'too flippant to be a drama', not quite good enough at either to pick a genre and stick to it.
Quite rightly I think this erred more on the comedy side. Something that, IMO, Toby Stephens is actually pretty good at- his ability to play an almost inexplicably likable arsehole is in full plumage throughout. The drama element itself is actually not a drama so much as it's just a slightly inappropriate comedy set within the format of a fairly standard police procedural, and any serious moments of character discovery are fairly swiftly undermined by story threads ultimately hitting a punchline. A little less with the attempts at seriousness would actually have probably gone a long way into pulling it more definitively into a genre and avoiding the dramedy-coma associations. Though to be fair it could have probably done with a little more cynical smarts from other characters in counterpoint to the leads being... well, basically idiots. I think 1982 wanted a couple of its jokes back, the RT and I are in agreement on that point at least, but I feel like that's more a failing of the show not coming off as self-aware enough to know that jokes like those were bad within the context of its own setting.
I'll give it a middling score. I'd like to see the rest of the series, and I would like to think that given a little time and some development it could actually evolve into a sort of... modern-day cynical Moonlighting kind of thing. It's not quite there yet though.
I'd give it a C+ ish. (That's actually a C- for the show, but it gets bonus points just cause I quite like Toby Stephens and he's not on TV enough, darnit.)
Also, semi-relatedly, I've got ask- what is it with the stealth gingers lately? Both Cumberbatch and Stephens err distinctly on the auburn side yet you wouldn't actually know it half the time.
In recognition of which, I'm just gonna' leave this here. I know I've posted it before but that, seemingly, is not going to stop me. *draws sparkly hearts*
