Being Human (US)

[tartysuz]

Did anyone catch the first ep of the North American version of Being Human? It's a promising show, with specific appeal for genre geeks and Supernatural fans (ex-SPN writer Jeremy Carver, ex-SPN recurring guest Mark Pellegrino).



As I said, this ep is promising. I mean, how can you go wrong with "a vampire, a werewolf and a ghost shack up"? Oh, but the UK version found a way. In general, the UK production suffered from:

• undercharacterization of the ghost and lack of rules for her powers and her unclear relationship with the ghostly world;
  
  
• overwhinification of the werewolf;
  
  
• a vampire cabal plot (enough said) that overtook the characterization of the vampires, so that almost none of them demonstrate consistent motivation;
  
  
• poor plotting: they attempted to stuff a story more suitable to a 60-episode long game into 6 episodes in the short first season;
  
  
• mistaking ridiculosity for complexity.

Here's where the North American series works:

• Sam Huntington is awesome as the werewolf. In the UK version, when the plotting and writing were thin, Russell Tovey melted into a mound of neurotic tics. It got tiring. Huntington sells the connections his character makes between his werewolfism and his sensitive (read: guilt-ridden) nature. He seems like a very social person, but being a werewolf has made him push everyone away, lest he hurt them. Also, the addition of his sister ramps up the tension and makes for a cracker of a cliffhanger.
  
  
• We see the vampire and the werewolf become roommates and how they meet the ghost. In the original series, the three were already in the situation -- which is okay, but we never did get the story of their meeting. These kinds of things are important in understanding the dynamics between the three principals. I'm okay with not knowing, at least for now, how the werewolf and the vampire actually met. They work at the same hospital, so it could have been as mundane as a couple of supernaturals recognizing each other
  
  
• Seeds are laid for plots that will take time to resolve. The North American version has the advantage of starting with a 13-episode order (rather than 6), and two seasons of stories to draw from. They are setting themselves up to use this advantage well.
  
  
• Mark Pellegrino. In one second, and ordinary joe. In the next, completely unsettling! This is a badass vampire who has "passed" among humans for a long time (I don't think they said how long) for a reason. He is a great improvement over his British counterpart, who was much too much like Benny Hill to take seriously as a vampire leader, much less someone who has a hold on the alpha vamp of the series.
  
  
• Mark Pellegrino and Sam Witwer. HOT. The pair that I'd thought would be the slash focus on the show was the vampire and the werewolf, being roommates and all (how amusing was it that the house rental scene was almost word-for-word the same as Holmes and Watson's scene in Sherlock?). However, the hold that Pellegrino's Bishop has over Witwer's Aidan is messed up and intense. I mean, that flashback of Bishop taking the younger Aidan to feast on a wedding party? Or Bishop taking Aidan to a brothel-like feeding den, where Aidan hooks up with a girl and Bishop watches? They could be psychologically, irrationally and erotically co-dependent!

There were a couple of things I didn't like:

• Why did they make Aidan a surgical nurse? Being a glorified hospital janitor was perfect. No one knows your name, most people treat you as part of the furniture, you can sneak around and clean up other vampires' messes, you have access to all the weird, secret places in the hospital and you can disappear for long stretches at a time with no one asking. Being a surgical nurse would seriously put you under scrutiny. And you'd be around blood while being around people all the time. I just can't see a good reason for it. Is this occupation inflation, to glam the vampire up a smidge?
  
  
• The ghost is announcey. Partially, she hasn't had a lot of people to interact with, so maybe it makes sense that she's outside of things. On the bright side, they did emphasize a very basic want of hers that the original series didn't stumble upon until the end, which is her very simple need to touch people, to be seen and to be heard. Is it of any significance that she's both a woman and a visible minority?
  
  
• The CGI on the werewolf. This is the second CGI werewolf I've seen and disliked this week! (The other was in Doctor Who, new series, 2.02.) The hokieness of the old-fashioned practical effects werewolves on Supernatural were slightly easier to overlook because we weren't seeing full transformations, we were told they weren't werewolves like we'd been taught to think about it, and, uh, where did my mind go? Anyway, the point is, we knew the characters well enough that we could concentrate on the story instead (plus, if you'd gotten this far into SPN, you were inurred to bargain-basement effects). In the first ep of Being Human, the werewolf transformation is a big set-piece and so the visuals were overly important. (Also, it is the transformation of a lead character, whereas the werewolves on Supernatural were monsters of the week.)
  
  
• It's hard not to unsee Aidan Turner as the vampire -- something that's going to be hard to shake since they named this vampire Aidan. Luckily, Witwer is a good actor, so I'm sure he'll make the vampire his own creation, like he made Davis Bloom/Doomsday on Smallville. But if I had my druthers, they'd have brought Turner over instead of making him continue with the UK version.

In the end, I came away from this pilot a lot more optimistic about the series than I did after the pilot of the UK series.

Note: This show is technically a Canadian/US production, but I'm shortening references to it to Being Human (US), mainly for the symmetry with Being Human (UK).