It follows the safe and successful route of having a human form an uneasy alliance with a non-human, but it places them in a dark Noir environment. It eschews the usual gothic overtones that vampire shows usually have in favour of a more realistic, mafia style. It reminded me of Copolla’s Godfather (1972) in many ways; the main bad guy, Julian Luna, even looks like Part III's Andy Garcia.
Julian is the "prince" of the city; he oversees the five vampire clans, known collectively as the Kindred. Each of the Kindred have a different agenda and work secretly behind the scenes to attain it, but there are laws in place that govern how much they can do alone. Those same laws are designed to protect and sustain their anonymity so the humans don't begin to hunt their kind. That hiding in the open is known as the Masquerade. The five vampire clans can cause it to get a little confusing, but it gave the show a lot of scope for future story lines.
The biggest failing is SF Police Detective Frank Kohanek, the main good guy; his acting is forced and melodramatic. Mercifully, he isn't always the main focus of each episode and as it gets deeper into clan politics he's featured even less.
When Frank isn't in it, it gets good. It's still flawed, I've yet to see a first season of anything that isn't, but it gets more right than it gets wrong.
The characters (except for the aforementioned Frank), the city, and the Masquerade are all believable. If you want some vamp action that's not targeted at teens and deals with adult themes it's worth watching. Sadly, it was shelved after 8 episodes, so we'll never know how it would've played out.
8 episodes, approx 45 mins each (the first episode is longer).
3½ tears of blood out of 5
4 comments:
I used to play Vampire. I lent all my books but the newest one to someone who moved out of state. They have a really fun character creation system that's largely based on merits/flaws. It's much more fun to make characters than it is to play them.
I've only seen pieces of this one, but it looked a lot better than one might expect it to be.
I really enjoyed most of it. It had lots of moody talking moments and almost no action scenes, I'm guessing that may have played a part in its cancellation.
I played some RPG years ago but nothing in the Vampire world.
Didn't the lead actor die?
I thought that's why it never kept going.
Wiki just said it was cancelled, no reason why. I checked the guys bio and he did die shortly after. Feck. He was good. I'm the sads now.
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