Pilot roundup time! It's leak season online, so on Thursday, I checked out the pilots for J.J. Abrams' Fringe and the TV adaptation of Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse books, True Blood.

Fringe was rather meh. I might tune in for the second episode, to see just how sad an X-Files ripoff it's going to be, but right now I'm on the "leave it" side of the "take it or leave it" conundrum. I really enjoyed the first part of the pilot, but when they started pulling in the big mytharc guns, it just felt silly. It was entertaining, certainly, but... While it's easy to suspend one's disbelief for crazy "fringe" science, it's a lot harder to swallow when the stupid little details closer to reality aren't believable. The whole show loses grounding. A dude's skin is reduced to the consistency of Jell-o, but he still keeps his eyebrows and a perfect head of hair? The devil is in the details, writers. The ending kind of sucked.

Still, there were some aspects of the show that were pretty cool. I liked the way they floated the location cues in the scene. That was just neat! And Denethor was awesome in his role as a brilliant but insane scientist. The astral plane sequence was delightfully trippy, and all the other visual effects were very well done. WOO, ZOIC!

But yeah. While I imagine it'll find an audience somewhere, that somewhere won't be my couch.


True Blood was a bit more difficult to quantify. The pilot is quite faithful to the events of the first half of the first book, so good job TV creative team! Unfortunately, that meant that all the things that bugged me about the book were there in force. Though I'm probably letting my book-irk and utter lack of patience for Bill color my perception of the show, as the show actually did a passable job showing why Sookie was attracted to him. (For the record: Sookie/Sam, woo!)

They did a great job with Sookie's psychic effect, though the vamp effect was utterly laughable. The guy at the convenience store looked like some dweeby vampire rabbit! Also, the sex was way more graphic and obnoxious than it needed to be. Stupid HBO.

I think it definitely shows promise, though. Anna Paquin's Southern accent has improved considerably since the first X-Men. And it'll be nice to have a vampire show on TV that isn't all brooding angst and private detectiving. There's a unique, quirky freshness to the novels that I think will do well on TV. I'm curious to see how it adapts.

Labels: tv