Review: Ten Pilots, One Day

Last Saturday I went over to my friend’s house, who has a massive home entertainment system, and spent the day watching the pilot episodes of ten different shows. Why? Because it sounded like fun. There was just so much stuff coming out under the wide umbrella of speculative fiction that I thought it would be cool to marathon the pilots of it all at once.

In alphabetic order, they were Andor, House of the Dragon, Interview with the Vampire, The Midnight Club, The Rings of Power, The Sandman, She Hulk, Wednesday, Willow and Vampire Academy. 

Here’s an interesting side-effect of such a project: a subconscious part of your brain believes it’s actually watching ten episodes of the same show, which leads to musings such as: “how are the vampires going to handle the dragons?” and “it’s a shame the hobbits don’t have access to blasters” and “maybe Wednesday is Elora Danan.”

It was also fascinating to see how many similarities arose between so many seemingly different genre shows. Just off the top of my head, this collection of pilots involved at least two examples of: wolves on the loose, mysterious naked men, tragic car accidents, succession crises hinged upon women being next in line for the throne, New Zealand scenery, reveals that happened so quickly I suspect they’re red herrings, a lost sibling, whispers in a character’s ear that the audience is not immediately privy to, hidden identities, impending death heralded by a pronounced cough, actresses cast as in-jokes by dint of their previous roles in earlier projects, and Bill Paterson (you know him, he’s the guy who played Fleabag’s dad).

It got a little dizzying at times, noticing the echoes of various tropes and concepts, but interesting too, in seeing just how reliant we are on certain storytelling tools.

And watching so many shows in quick succession brought up another question: what exactly makes a good show? Or a good story in general? Because it became obvious very quickly that some of these pilots were of substantially better quality than others. It’s a question I’ll try to answer at the end of this post...

Andor

Commentators are declaring this the greatest Star Wars since the original trilogy – to the point that it makes even those movies look bad, given it’s genuinely interested in exploring the reality of life under a fascist regime, rendering the fact that a farm-boy eventually destroys the Empire’s greatest weapon with his magical powers as more than a little silly.

Ironically, it’s apparently not getting great viewing numbers, perhaps because no one was asking for a Rogue One prequel (which was itself a prequel) and perhaps because Disney already blew its load with the lacklustre Obi Wan Kenobi and the downright bad Book of Boba Fett. People are just Star Wars-ed out.

But right from the start Andor establishes its “not for kids” tone by having its first set-piece take place in a brothel. No, it’s not explicitly identified as such, and there isn’t any nudity, but that’s clearly what it is. Only the restraint prevents it from being too try-hard, in direct contrast to Torchwood’s cringeworthy attempts to set itself apart from Doctor Who by throwing as much sex into the episode as possible.

At the start of his story, Cassian isn’t a rebel spy or a saboteur, but a small-time hustler, working off a network of favours and deals (the pilot has a beautifully-structured arrangement of scenes in which he’s trying to negotiate with various associates, and each interaction goes worse than the one before – clearly the noose is tightening around him). But he’s also looking for his missing sister, glimpsed only as a child in un-subtitled flashbacks to his youth. We don’t yet know what happened to her, but that he’s searching for her in a brothel means it was nothing good.

With those character hooks established, the episode branches out to include Syril Karn, an Imperial brownnosing lackey who takes his job way too seriously. Having written the reports on the deaths of two other employees of the Empire (killed by Cassian in partial self-defense) he makes it his business to track down their killer – perhaps out of a genuine regard for their lives, perhaps because he sees this as a stepping stone in his career.

Amusingly, his diffident superior rattles off an “official” narrative of the deaths in order to avoid further scrutiny, and is absolutely right in his hypothetical assessment of what happened. But ambition, stubbornness, or a sense of injustice has been piqued in Syril, and he whips his bored and overworked colleagues into action.

My first impression is a positive one, even if it’s clearly setting up the board before getting to the good stuff. Knowing that it’s part of a monolithic franchise, the show has the luxury of leaning on the audience’s pre-existing knowledge of its world (no opening scrawl!) which spares it from any clunky exposition or time-consuming world-building. Instead, clever little titbits are strewn throughout, organically embedded in the story, like the fact a droid must draw upon extra power reserves if it has to lie.

In other words, the show has the time and space to focus on what it’s really interested in: what life is like under a fascist regime, and how various types of people respond to it: join, endure, or fight.  

Just like Rogue One, there are no Jedi and minimal aliens, and even superfluous-seeming scenes (like the flashbacks to Cassian’s youth) are clearly being seeded for greater pay-off later. Everyone feels alive in a way that’s indefinable; you simply get the sense that they carry on with their lives whenever the cameras aren’t on them – a sharp contrast to the stagey quality of other Star Wars media. And as ever, the droids steal the show.

 

House of the Dragon

The prequel to a game-changingly popular show that ended with the equivalent of an acrimonious divorce between fandom and showrunners (with the entire cast as an exhausted third party) is an interesting thing to be. With that in mind, it was difficult to gauge how many viewers this would garner in the wake of its predecessor.

It clearly hasn’t done too badly, with season two already announced and ratings high enough to justify that choice, but at the same time it’s just as obvious that it’s never going to be the cultural juggernaut that Game of Thrones was. The general consensus seems to be that it contains the spectacle and shock-and-awe drama of the mothershow, but provides none of the immediate investment in its roster of characters.

The show’s thesis statement is laid out in its opening minutes, in which the solemn narrator tells us: “the only thing that could tear down the House of the Dragon was itself.” This then, is what the show is about: the civil war between opposing factions of the Targaryen dynasty whilst at the height of their power.

A major problem with this concept is that we’re not given much of a reason to care. As George R.R. Martin has proudly stated several times, there’s nobody who is particularly likeable or easy to cheer for, and that’s even with the showrunners going out of their way to make everyone more palatable than their source material counterparts (having skimmed through the faux-history book upon which this is based, pretty much everyone has been significantly white-washed).

There is a glimmer of a good idea buried in here: that defacto protagonists Rhaenyra and Alicent have the truest, purest relationship of all the characters on the show, which is inevitably going to be torn asunder due to the machinations of the patriarchy. Problem is, this is a Game of Thrones spin-off, and I have no expectation whatsoever that this premise is going to be pulled off with anything even remotely resembling nuance or insight.

The pilot leans surprisingly heavily on recognizable motifs of the original show: a white-blonde girl flying through the air on dragon-back, Ramin Djawadi’s Targaryen theme, and the setting of King’s Landing with its distinctive red rooftops. Most surprisingly, it tries to establish a direct thoroughfare to Game of Thrones with the reveal that the Targaryen conquest was brought about due to a prophetic dream that requires the bloodline to prepare for a cataclysmic invasion from the north.

This is a double-edged sword. The entire purpose of a prequel is largely to bring resonance to what is (chronologically) still to come, and yet in this case, any reminder of what does come only leaves a bitter taste in one’s mouth. That so-called “Song of Fire and Ice” is more like a Song of Jack and Shit considering nothing in the prophecy materialized in any meaningful way. It certainly didn’t require a Targaryen on the throne, the kingdoms didn’t need to be united, and the terrifying spectre of the Long Night was barely an inconvenience.

What is essentially the initiating event of this story in its entirety, means nothing.

But hey, maybe that’s the point. Martin is all about the deconstruction of fantasy staples, and it would be just like him to decide that the veracity of a prophecy is significantly less important than how the characters are informed, motivated and changed by it. Still, I think it’s a mildly baffling choice to remind people of how badly the mothershow ended (kind of like how if you want to enjoy anything in the pre-sequel era of Star Wars, you have to steadfastly not think about how Palpatine somehow returned, was pulling everyone’s strings as a cloned zombie, and that nothing anybody achieved in the original trilogy ever meant anything at all).

But there’s some deft Character Establishing Moments here, even if it’s just a reaction or expression, and some details that make the world look lived-in, complete with its own internal logic (I loved that the dragon handlers have shaved heads, because you obviously wouldn’t want to have a full head of hair should a stray plume of fire shoot your way).

Then of course, it gets too heavy-handed with its Very Important Messaging. Power is to be found in the undercurrents of gossip, tournaments, council meetings, alliances and childbirth, but the juxtaposition of the bloody and chaotic jousting with the queen’s horrific labour and eventual C-section is perhaps a bit much. What are they even going for with this? A comparison, in that labour is just as painful and dangerous as armed combat? Or a contrast, in that the knights are being cheered for their pointless violence while the queen’s consent (and life) is brutally taken from her as she struggles through the only ordeal that actually matters?

Basically, the characters are as deftly drawn as the cracks within the Targaryen clan, but there’s no one to invest it (no equivalent of Tyrion, Daenerys, Arya, or even Jon) and certainly no “push a kid out the window” scene that pretty much sealed the original show’s success.

 

Interview with the Vampire

I had heard good buzz about this one, but was totally blown away by how good it turned out to be. I’m actually tempted to re-read Anne Rice’s novel, just to get a refresher on the story and a baseline to what these new writers have decided to do with the material.

The Tom Cruise/Brad Pitt film is pretty iconic by this point, so I appreciate the fact the showrunners challenged themselves to do something different while still keeping the narrative beats and basic characterization of the novel intact. There’s obviously more time to delve into some of the nuances of Rice’s plot (the film completely cuts out the tragedy of Louis’s brother, which is a major part of the pilot episode) but it’s not afraid to spiral out into drastically altered directions either.

As opposed to a plantation owner in 1791, Louis has been reimagined as a brothel keeper in 1910, negotiating the pressures of a disapproving family (who nevertheless depend on his wealth), the tightrope of being a successful Black man in the Jim Crow south, and his closeted sexuality. Yes folks, they have thrown away the book's coy subtext between Louis and Lestat. Louis is explicitly gay, and the two have very explicit on-screen sex.

This opens up a wealth of possibilities: vampirism has more often than not been a metaphor for “otherness”, whether it’s the unpleasant antisemitism of Nosferatu or the homoeroticism of... well, Anne Rice’s original Interview with the Vampire. Now contrast that concept with this article on Fiction’s History of Confederate Vampires, which demonstrates that Blackness has never really had a chance to experiment with the allegories of vampirism. 

Well, that changes now. It’s fascinating to see the concept of vampirism and all its subtext play out under the spectre of historical and institutionalized racism. It changes the entire game, from the way Louis has to carefully regulate his presentation and behaviour, to how his already-fraught power dynamic with Lestat now has to contend with the rough waters of their profoundly different backgrounds, identities and levels of privilege.

Whatever Louie is going to do with the “dark gift” bestowed on him may well follow the book, but the showrunners have given themselves a vast new scope for how an angry and mistreated Black man might strike back against oppression once supernatural power has been granted to him.

(Weird comparison: the Fear Street trilogy. Both stories have effectively protected themselves from the gibbering hordes of “woke pandering” complainers because they’ve ensured their protagonist’s race and queerness is an intrinsic part of the story. It’s not just box-ticking or virtue signalling – it’s a real and crucial part of how this story is going to unfold).

But perhaps the show’s most interesting innovation (though I say this as someone who is not sure where it’s going or why it’s happening) is in the story’s framing device. Turns out, this is the second time Louis has been interviewed by Daniel Molloy, their prior encounter having ended badly back in the 1970s. Now Louis has the chance to re-examine and recontextualize his own narrative, as well as look at how much Molloy himself has changed in the intervening years. I can’t pinpoint what exactly, but there’s something in this reframing that feels deeply promising.

 

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

According to Tumblr, watching this show makes me a war criminal, but as with a lot of things that are set upon by fandom wank in the leadup to their release (2016’s Ghostbusters also comes to mind) it ends up deserving neither the slavish praise nor the excessive hate that commentators attempt to affix to it. As a piece of entertainment, it’s fine – though I have to admit being amused by the sudden sanctification of Peter Jackson’s films, which are now talked about as the one true adaptation of the material. His trilogy is definitive, and far better than it had any right to be, but I was THERE when it was released, and this newfound fandom acclaim for it was definitely not apparent at the time.

But I fondly remember those years of the theatrical trilogy, and was more than a little curious about how this – the most expensive television show of all time, or so they say – was going to play out.

The pilot has a lot of ground to cover: a reintroduction to Middle Earth, a history of the Elves, and glimpses of various races that populate this world. As in the films, they chose Galadriel to be their narrator, and there’s a very truncated retelling of the Trees of Valinor, the Oath of Fëanor and the defeat of Morgoth. From the opening scene to the closing credits, this episode covers thousands of years’ worth of history before settling on a singular thrust for its narrative to follow: the search for Sauron.

As in House of the Dragon, this show also deals with a large ensemble cast, though its characters herald from a much wider diaspora of culture and geography. This is already a world divided against itself, and in its introduction to each of the races, the episode gradually winds its way down from the lofty Elves to the earthy Hobbits. Menfolk are scattered here and there, but for now at least, the Dwarves remains concealed in their mountain keeps.

I have to admit, I got a little choked up at the first sight of the hobbits, who at this point in time do not dwell in the Shire, but are nomads and wanderers, keeping themselves hidden from the eyes of all other living creatures. They’re fussy and worrisome and a little self-important, and it’s delightful. Even better, our main characters within this plot-strand are two girl hobbits: Poppy Proudfoot and Elanor Brandyfoot, the latter of whom has an adventurous streak.  

Please don’t take this as a dig against Tolkien, as I’ve already discussed at some length my appreciation for his female characters, but it strikes me as incredible that this show has done in a single episode what Tolkien did not in a life-time’s worth of writing: effortlessly give us two female hobbits as main characters.

But if there’s a protagonist to the proceedings, then it’s certainly Galadriel, which strikes me as a wise choice. She’s easily the most recognizable character to audiences who are only casual fans of the material, and (along with Elrond) the only one who bridges the history between The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings. In the wake of Morgoth’s defeat, she’s taken it upon herself to track down Sauron, his greatest lieutenant, much to the consternation of her fellows.

Yes, she’s very much The Cassandra of the piece, though I think Morfydd Clark does a reasonably good job in the role. Stepping into shoes previously filled by Cate Blanchett must have been daunting, and I’ve no doubt it’s difficult for a very young person to emanate that necessary aura of fathomless age, but by the end of this episode I felt pretty invested in what she’s trying to do. Motivated both by the death of her brother and the common good, she’s clearly going to be a major instigator of events going forward.

If there’s one thing that did bug me a little, it’s that the writers can’t help but add unnecessary conflict. To be fair, there’s a huge amount of jerkass Elves in The Silmarillion, but The Lord of the Rings is a testimony to how allied forces come together as a united front in order to take down a greater evil. The Rings of Power is clearly trying to straddle a fine line between the two, but not doing it in a particularly nuanced way. As such, we’ve got Fantastic Racism a-plenty, with Elves playing warden to Southron Men and being called “knife-ears” and facing constant hostility for their troubles.  

Even in Galadriel’s childhood, while she’s living in what is practically Heaven itself, she’s bullied by her peers. It’s all a bit trite, somehow. At least conflict in The Silmarillion derived from genuinely earth-shattering events; here it’s because some snotty kids want to destroy a little girl’s paper boat.

To be clear, Peter Jackson fell into the same trap, what with Theoden prevaricating on whether or not to help Gondor, or the Ents initially refusing to assist in the war effort, or Aragon being a reluctant king because he feared the weakness in his bloodline – and it annoyed me then as well. Some stories are meant to be tonally uplifting and The Lord of the Rings is one of them.

But it’s only the first episode, so we’ll see how things unfold. For now at least, no one can deny there are some gorgeous visuals at work: Galadriel rejecting the call of Valinor while bathed in both light and rain, Elanor peering about in the foreground while an out-of-focus warg on the clifftop behind her stalks out of sight, the fiery comet speeding down from the heavens as witnessed by almost the entire cast... if nothing else, we now know what a multi-million dollar television show looks like.

 

The Midnight Club                                                                                                      

I watched the first episode of this on Saturday the sixth of December, and found out it had been cancelled on Sunday the seventh of December. Which doubly sucks since I was under the impression that it (like Mike Flanagan’s other Netflix shows) would be a one-and-down. But nope, apparently it ended with a bunch of cliff-hangers and an expectation that they’d get a second season. I’m so tired of this happening. What’s the point of getting invested in anything??

Based on the Christopher Pike novel of the same name, both book and show grapple with some very dark subject matter: terminally ill teenagers reckoning with their mortality decades before their time. Sometimes a story hook is so compelling that you feel a little depressed that you didn’t come up with it yourself, and in this case, the teenagers gather at midnight to tell each other scary stories and reassert their promise to one another: that the first among them to die will return to tell the others what to expect on the other side.

It's ripe material for Flanagan, who has proved his credentials in adapting the horror works of others while putting his own spin on things, and the premise itself is a winner. As soon as you’re introduced to these kids, you’re keeping an eye on their symptoms, wondering which one will go first, infusing the entire show with a sense of creeping dread. 

Iman Benson plays protagonist Ilonka, diagnosed with thyroid cancer and forced to drop out of college to undergo treatment. Facing less than a year to live, she discovers the Brightcliffe Home hospice on-line, and soon enough has convinced her foster father to let her enrol... but she arrives with a secret. She’s heard about one of its past attendees, a girl called Julia Jayne who apparently went missing for several days while in attendance, and returned completely cured of her illness. Clearly, Ilonka is chasing the same miracle.

It's moody and melancholy, and the wooden bannisters and oval doorframes of Brightcliffe make for a gorgeous setting, but there are some pretty glaring leaps in logic to allow the story to proceed as Flanagan wants it to. Like, there’s only a single nurse on night duty, in a hospice filled with sick youngsters that could die at any minute? No way. Or even the concept of the hospice of this kind, which would not only need to be much closer to a larger medical facility, but provide accommodation for parents or caregivers so they could stay close to their dying children.

At another point, Ilonka meets a neighbour to Brightcliffe who makes enigmatic mentions of a “vortex” and the healing properties of the water in the area, after which Ilonka asks no follow-up questions, even though this is her entire purpose in coming to the place. I guess it was too early in the proceedings to be getting those kinds of answers.

Here’s the thing: of all the pilots I watched on that Saturday, this is the show I continued with first. So for what it’s worth, it clearly had the biggest effect on me in regards to finding out what happened next, even if it was hit with cancellation immediately afterwards. Raur!

 

The Sandman

Of all the pilots, this was undoubtedly the most unusual, which is unsurprising given its subject matter. Foregoing the usual attempts to introduce premise and character, it instead tells what could almost exist as a standalone fifty-minute story, in which a hubristic mage attempts to bring his deceased son back to life by ensnaring the Angel of Death. This never goes well.

Sure enough, something goes wrong with the ceremony, and although a creature of immense power and mystery appears, he’s certainly not the being the participants were expecting...

I read the first of The Sandman comics years ago, and remember very little beyond the descent into hell and fact it played out like an anthology series. However, having read plenty of his other novels and comics, I’m confident in describing it as quintessential Neil Gaiman, the most Neil Gaiman thing you can imagine. If you’ve read The Sandman, then you have the baseline understanding for everything else this man has written.

Tom Sturridge plays the titular Sandman, who (in straightforward terms) is the God of Dreams. And kudos to both the actor and the casting director: you look at this guy and you absolutely believe you’re seeing something otherworldly. All his features and limbs are in the right place, but he doesn’t look human at all.

He’s the one that ends up trapped in the basement of an overly-ambitious sorcerer who is playing with forces far beyond his reckoning, emerging from a fatal cocktail of grief, greed and ignorance. He can’t fathom what he’s gotten himself into, and even with Morpheus imprisoned, you can tell he’s not the master here. More importantly, his young (and still living) son Alex is a witness to all of this, and grows up under the heavy burden of knowing there’s a god in the basement of his house.

What makes it so different from the rest of the pilot episodes is that it largely takes place in a single location, and unfolds across a number of years (not as many as The Rings of Power, but quite a few!) Alex goes from a child to an adult to an old man, and across the course of the episode several story threads are set up to (no doubt) be explored later, making the old mansion a sort of nexus of history.

That the episode is entitled “chapter one” makes perfect sense, as it feels more like a chapter in a book than an episode of television; the opening act to a much larger story. It is confident in its vision and takes its time to unfold, and there are plenty of striking images throughout. Even having not watched any of the other episodes, I can tell that each one is going to be very different from the one before, drawing on the epic scope of Gaiman’s graphic novels to tell its tales. Like I said, that makes it the most unique of all these pilots.

 

She Hulk

Well, I had to watch something from the MCU pantheon, just to tick every box. Plus, I couldn’t say no to Tatiana Maslany – she should be an A-listing megastar by now, though I suppose being in a Marvel show will certainly raise her profile (as has been said elsewhere, Maslany didn’t get the MCU, the MCU got Maslany).

Like Andor, this pilot is only half-an-hour long, which means we race through the plot like it’s on steroids. Cousins Jennifer Walters and Bruce Banner are taking a road trip together. Boom. They swerve off the road to miss a spaceship hovering over them and Jen gets infected with Bruce’s blood. Boom. He takes her to a remote island laboratory to ease her into her new life as a Hulk. Boom. She masters the transformation and tries to integrate herself back into normal life. Boom. It does not work. To be continued...

Honestly, I felt a bit of whiplash with all the plot-points thrown at me in quick succession. From what I gather, there was some mild complaining over how quickly Jen was able to gain control over her Hulk alter-ego (which isn’t really an alter-ego at all, as she remains fully cognizant after transforming) which she explicitly ties to her ability to control her anger. According to her, she can do it better, because she’s a woman who has infinitely more practice at it than Bruce.

So, two things. Naturally this show been dragged into the tedious culture war, with the usual suspects panicking about how any discussion of women’s issues will destroy civilization or whatever the hell they think is going on, but I suspect the real reason we skipped any depiction of in-depth training for Jen is the exact same reason that Rey and Korra also missed out on long-term story arcs that could have shown them steadily gaining control over their superpowers: it’s already been done.

That’s the problem with female counterparts, successors or foils to male characters: the obstacles they face have already been surmounted, and so to avoid repeating themselves, the (usually male) writers just write her as a prodigy. Saves time. It’s a natural side-effect of women having to constantly wait their turn for the spotlight until the man’s story has played out.

On the opposite end of the scale, others are accusing the show’s feminism of being largely performative, in which Jen rattles off a few buzzwords and makes a few quips, without anything ever delving deeper than the level of a paddling pool. To which I say: it’s the MCU for heaven’s sake. You cannot have seriously been expecting a nuanced exploration on the topic of women’s rights.

Basically, the social commentary is so featherlight as to be meaningless to people interested in the subject, and yet overt enough that plenty of adult men are enraged by its presence. That said, I have to admit appreciating the irony of dudes getting mad at Jen for lecturing Bruce on how she’s better at being a Hulk than he is (“I’m an expert at controlling my anger because I do it infinitely more than you”) and mansplaining his condition back to him. Yeah, it’s annoying isn’t it. IMAGINE HOW IT MUST FEEL TO EXPERIENCE IT EVERY DAY.

With its short run-time, this pilot had to get through a lot, and so was perhaps helped by Jen being one of those wall-breaking characters who addresses the audience just to get the ball rolling. To be frank, the concept of the Hulk has never really interested me that much (it’s like Jekyll and Hyde mingled with Juggernaut, the worst X-Man) so I won’t continue with this one, especially knowing they’re going to waste the opportunity on exploring the differences between a man and a woman’s anger.

But it was nice to see Tatiana Maslany again, and the drunk girls helping her in the public bathroom was the best scene.

 

Wednesday

If The Sandman had the most unique and restrained pilot, then this one was the most overstuffed, and it definitely felt like the longest. The combination of Tim Burton and The Addams Family (with Danny Elfman writing the score) feels like a match made in heaven but it’s difficult to get a grasp of what exactly they’re trying to do with this one. Perhaps I’m overly attached to the two nineties films with Christina Ricci in the titular role, but I have a sinking feeling that showrunners Miles Millar and Alfred Gough don’t really get the IP they’re adapting (that they were also behind the diminishing returns of Smallville doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence either).

Complete fidelity to the source material isn’t sacrosanct (as Interview with the Vampire just proved) but when you’re dealing with some as ironic and subversive as The Addams Family, you kinda have to understand why it’s so popular in the first place. And maybe I’m being unfair since I’ve literally only watched the first episode, but outside the Goth aesthetic and Jenna Ortega’s great performance I’m not sure these guys do.

For instance, the story begins with Wednesday getting expelled from school after she dumps a bunch of piranhas into the pool to punish those that stuffed Pugsley into his locker for the umpteenth time. As a response, her parents decide to send her to Nevermoor Academy, a boarding school for outcasts that Morticia herself attended in her youth.

Um... is there a reason Wednesday wasn’t already at this school? Why would Gomez and Morticia send their kids to a public school when a place like Nevermoor was available?

Wednesday arrives and is duly introduced to the principal, the roommate, the teachers and the student body. And what do you know? Even a school designed especially for social misfits has cliques. Again, doesn’t this defeat the point of a school for outcasts? She’s given a perky roommate and an arch-rival, and at this point the viewer starts getting hammered by at least a dozen different plots.

Let’s see, we’ve got a mystery concerning Wednesday’s father, a werewolf on the loose, Wednesday’s psychic visions, a fellow student acting weird, strange activity within the school halls, a prophecy that foretells Wednesday will bring about mass death and destruction, and – for reasons that absolutely escape me – a love triangle.

What on earth possessed them to add a love triangle for a character like Wednesday Addams? Especially with a character like Enid as her roommate, providing us with a perfect Glinda/Elphaba, Slytherin/Hufflepuff pairing? Baffling.

At least it looks good, with plenty of cobblestones and wrought iron fences and Gothic architecture, and the cast is top-notch. Gwendoline Christie is always the best part of any show, Christina Ricci’s role is more than just a fanservice cameo, and Jenna Ortego certainly commits to the bit as apparently she never blinks on-screen. That’s a lot of work put in to something most will never even notice, but hey.

They throw everything but the kitchen sink into this, and though I’m sure I’ll continue with it eventually, I’m not in a huge hurry. Basically, I can’t get my head around the fact that Wednesday is prevented from being a true outcast by putting her in an environment full of them, while simultaneously depicting Nevermoor as just as cliquey as any other ordinary high school. I guess some tropes just can’t be denied, though it results in a bewildering attempt to have one’s narrative cake (Nevermoor is where outcasts belong) and eat it too (our quirky underdog still doesn’t fit in).

 

Willow

As legacy-quels go, no one was really clamouring for more Willow, but I was thrilled at the idea. I probably have more of an emotional connection to the 1988 film than the entirety of Star Wars (what Leia was to others, Sorsha was to me) and like the Netflix prequel to The Dark Crystal, this world felt ripe for expansion.

Any continuing story had a natural and obvious hook: what happened to Elora Danan, the magical baby that was essentially the Living MacGuffin of the film? She ended up being something of a red herring given that the prophecies surrounding her – that she would bring about the downfall of the evil Bavmorda – didn’t exactly come true. Sure, she was the impetus that led to Bavmorda’s eventual self-destruction, but Elora really could have been any old baby.

What kickstarts the series, over thirty-four years later, is the lingering question of why exactly Elora was so special. After all, despite her indirect effect on Bavmorda’s demise, she had the tell-tale birthmark, the endorsement of wise magical beings, and the prophetic destiny attached to her name – all staple components of a Messianic Chosen One.

Unsurprisingly, the show decides to go with the mystery of “who is Elora Danan?” to drive their pilot episode (rather like the heroic version of “who is Sauron?” that The Rings of Power has going on) though the question is answered before the credits roll. Or is it? Maybe I’m just overthinking what is meant to be a straightforward reveal, but the unveiling of Elora Danan is so anticlimactic and obvious that I have to believe there’s some sort of twist involved.

Perhaps inevitably, quite a lot is borrowed from Star Wars, both past and present. In the time since the conclusion of the film, Madmartigan and Sorsha have raised a pair of twins, Airk and Kit. But like Han Solo, Madmartigan has become an absentee father, having left the kingdom in order to protect Elora Danan from new threats that emerged in the wake of Bavmorda’s defeat (though to be fair, this no doubt has to do with Val Kilmer’s significant health problems).

Yeah, they pull a Happy Ending Override pretty quickly, and it’s up to a new generation of heroes to pick up the torch and find the sorcerer Willow Ulfgood (who pulls a Luke Skywalker in The Force Awakens and doesn’t turn up until the final seconds of the episode).

Willow feels very different from the rest of the pilots on this list, leaning heavily into YA fantasy (everyone is guided by their feelings, most of the dialogue is quippy banter, the credits roll to a modern pop-song) and embracing a colourful, slightly cheesy eighties vibe – though naturally, there is so much more diversity than there was back in 1988.

As a long-time fan, I ended up getting a little emotional at times, and the writers are clearly fans themselves, namedropping things like Tir Asleen, Galladorn, Cherlindrea, Nelwyns – and the prince is called Airk! They named him after Madmartigan’s old friend! Aww.

I can’t say I loved what they’re doing with Sorsha (she’s a rather stern queen who has only a little reservation about pressuring her daughter into an arranged marriage) but she narrates the opening introduction and is clearly going to be dealt with further as the episodes go on, so I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. And to see Joanne Whalley in this role again! It’s magic. I made Sorsha Woman of the Month back in November 2016, and I could never have foreseen this return.

So I’m all-in on Willow, though that comes as no surprise. Between the lofty ambition of The Rings of Power and the deconstructive spectacle of House of the Dragon, Willow snuggles in comfortably to the genre’s swords-and-sorcery niche. It knows its tone, it knows its story and it doesn’t feel like it has something to prove. It’s just going to be a fun ride.

(And as my friend commented, this definitely had the most likeable characters of all the shows we watched. Kit and Airk are definitely the children of Sorsha and Madmartigan, and the ensemble is already playing around with a myriad of fun dynamics. I’m ready for more!)

 

Vampire Academy

Okay, so this was definitely the black sheep of the day. The rest of the pilots aspire to be prestige television or can at least boast some high production values, but Vampire Academy has visibly less of a budget than everything else on this list, and a story that is borderline gibberish.

Whereas the other pilots know that their most important task is to establish character and premise, Vampire Academy dives headfirst into the world-building. So... there are vampires. And naturally, a vampire hierarchy. There’s a queen who is (I think) getting ready to abdicate because she’s old, even though she’s an immortal vampire, so I’m not sure how that works exactly. Like most vampires in this kind of story, they don’t seem to do much except swan around in evening gowns and attend glitzy events.

There are three types of vampire, which are basically classified as the royals, the bodyguards, and the feral ones that the second type protect the first type from. Our protagonists are Lissa (royal) who has Rose (guardian) for her bodyguard, and the two are best friends to boot. When the episode opens, they’re attending a party at a big castle with strobe lights, wearing ill-fitting dresses, and enjoying champagne as the paparazzi snap pictures of them.

Wait... vampires are drinking alcohol? And having their photos taken? Is that... even possible?

The showrunner is Julie Plec, who was also the mastermind behind the adaptation of The Vampire Diaries, and came to this with a pretty bad fandom rep: that her prior show was racist, sexist and that she eventually let fandom shape the course of her story. Vampire Academy, if nothing else, has a Black female lead (even if she’s in a subservient role to a white girl, which – ouch) and right off the bat asserts itself as targeted toward an older audience. The first spoken line of dialogue is: “I look like a fucking macaroon” and we get a close up of a bare butt as two party-goers have sex in an antechamber.

Whether or not this means the show will be better than her previous effort remains to be seen. Were it not for the fact that the show presents itself as complete fluff, I wouldn’t think so. There is so much exposition and world-building, none of which is conveyed particularly memorably. There’s plenty of queer-coded activity between the two female leads, but fear not – some bland male characters are here to diffuse that. We’re given a complete lack of context for this world (do humans know that vampires exist? Do humans exist at all? Does this take place in our world or an alternate history?) and an onslaught of characters and factions. Why do people do things? What does anyone believe in? Unclear.

Perhaps the most bizarre thing about it is that there’s really no need for anyone to be a vampire. It’s completely superfluous to the plot. They may as well all be rich weirdoes living in a micronation for all the difference it makes. Unlike Interview with the Vampire, in which vampirism provides a jumping-off point for discussing mortality, bloodlust, power and what it means to be human, this is just another story about the rich elite. The fact that they’re vampires is so utterly inconsequential that it’s almost funny. I mean, it's a major plot-point that some of them get killed in a car accident. How is that possible?

This is pure gold nonsense. I’ve no idea what’s going on. I’m totally going to watch the rest of it.

***

So having watched all these episodes, what was my takeaway? As they whizzed past, I couldn’t help but think about what makes the difference between a good show and a bad one. Naturally, the good ones are those that piqued my interest, held my attention and made me want to watch more. But what creates that impulse?

The writing and performances are key to that, though the latter is very much contingent on the former. A charismatic enough actor might well elevate lacklustre material, but give them something to really chew on, and suddenly an audience is captivated.

The general look of a show can also help: striking images or aesthetics will stir a viewer’s imagination (so a decent budget and/or cinematographer is helpful in this respect) but a solid script will be a solid script no matter what the finished product actually looks like.

With all that in mind, Andor and Interview with the Vampire were the standouts for me, followed by The Midnight Club and The Sandman. In those cases, the showrunners went the extra mile in providing something for the audience to THINK about: an insight, an idea, a possibility – something we’ve never pondered before, whether it’s the reality of a hardscrabble life under an oppressive regime, or the refiguration of a famous novel to examine racial tension, queer history, and the passage of time.

Some have great hooks, such as “terminal teens make a pact that the first one to die will try and contact the rest” or “a god is captured and kept prisoner in a basement.” They’re also beautiful to look at (sweeping landscapes, detailed sets, unobtrusive computer-effects) and filled with incredible performers – Jacob Anderson, Sam Reid, Iman Benson, Tom Sturridge, Diego Luna, Fiona Shaw. You can’t take your eyes off them.

They all featured intelligent writing that (for the most part) didn’t spell things out for the audience, requiring them to pay attention to what was unfolding, giving them room to infer things in the way the characters interacted and the storylines advanced. They each took a bit of time in setting up their premise and locales – the hospice, the mansion, the galaxy under Imperial rule, New Orleans in 1910 – to better demonstrate how these worlds inform the characters and their decision-making; trusting that the audience will have patience and that their material is interesting enough to sustain a slower start.

Then there’s the balancing act between plot and character. A story has to take place and ideally the characters are the initiators and drivers of the plot. But they must behave in ways that make sense. It’s certainly easier to make things happen when the characters are acting stupidly or irrationally, and threading the needle between a character’s personality and the natural flow of the plot is perhaps the most underrated storytelling skill a person can have. If you can do it well, no one will ever notice, and so it goes unremarked upon. 

It’s the main reason Andor and Interview with the Vampire were so good: because you simply cannot separate the plot from the characters. The plot is happening because of them, and in turn, they are shaped by the plot.

But more than all that, each show was willing to take a premise, whether a pre-existing book or a massive franchise, and explore it in ways that hadn’t been done before, to actually engage in themes and meaning and thoughtful commentary. It’s not just about encouraging mindless theorizing or baiting shippers, but telling a story that is free from executive and/or fandom meddling. You trust that these writers have something to say, and they’ve been given the creative freedom to say it.

I will certainly continue with Willow, but it played its fantasy tropes quite safe, whereas House of the Dragon and The Rings of Power are big on spectacle but perhaps rely a bit too heavily on the recognizability and popularity of their respective franchises. I’m still completely burnt out by the MCU so I won’t continue with She Hulk, but despite their flaws, I’ll get around to finishing Wednesday and Vampire Academy sooner or later. 

So it was quite fascinating to watch all these pilots in succession and gauge which ones were good, middling or just plain bad, and it provided something of a lesson in how to pitch a story. How were the characters established? How was exposition conveyed? How do you hook an audience? It’s helpful to not only watch what works, but what doesn’t work across a limited period of time.

Glancing over my reading/watching logs, I’ve watched quite a lot of crap this year, so it was almost with relief that I saved these shows for last. It’s going to be a very busy Christmas – in the sense that I’m going to spend a significant portion of it in front of the television, finishing what I started last Saturday.