I had intended to post on another topic today but between slowly recovering from a cold, a bad elbow that’s limiting my typing and family activities over the weekend that post isn’t ready yet. However a mini-rant came to me out of the blue a couple of nights ago so you get the benefit of that. 😉
Anyway, I was in the mood for some detective shows and had sat down to watch the TIVO recording of Monday’s episode of the new Hawaii Five-O and immediately noticed that the description was only two sentences – not unusual – but one was about McGarrett’s personal life, the other was about Danno’s and there was nothing about any case they might be investigating during the episode.
My brain did a full stop and I haven’t yet been able to bring myself to watch the episode.
Now, my reaction could be totally unfair here but this isn’t about being fair. This is about being a fan of mystery series over cop series. And a very irritated one at that. 😉
So, I watched the recording of Castle instead and at least got a few laughs even though that program is slowly developing its own problems. Oye. TV writers.
So, has anyone else ever had a series that they just wanted to keep loving or even like so badly but the way it kept focusing on a side obsession of a character or characters or even the personal lives of the characters instead of getting on with the action ruined it?
Please note, I’m not talking about normal character development here. Or even that delicate balance between an action plot and any romantic tangles or any other plain old relationships that might be floating around. I’m talking about straying from genre formula – whatever genre we’re talking about – until basically good storytelling gets completely sidetracked by what could be or should be a relatively quickly resolvable side arc to the point where individual episodes begin to bleed into one another because of one long draw-out obsession of whatever. And we could just as easily be talking about a book series as a TV series. I simply can’t think of a book example at the moment. I can think of several TV series it’s happened to which is why I should’ve been forewarned about Five-O when they started out with this Steve McGarrett being so obsessed about his parents deaths.
I guess I’m just a sucker for the buddy cop formula and got pulled in by my enjoyment of the McGarrett/Danno relationship in the new show.
Sigh.