New seasons are in the air

As September rolls on, the Fall TV season is finally getting under way in the US, which hopefully means there'll be some shows worth watching for a change - other than the darkly comic brilliance of True Blood, there's been precious little of note over the Summer. The CW was first out of the gate this year, pairing the fifth season of Supernatural with the launch of The Vampire Diaries the week before last. This week, Fox joined the fray with the second season of Fringe.

So how were they?

Supernatural Season 5
My inner teenager has always had a bit of a soft spot for Supernatural. Its combination of slick production values, tongue-in-cheek pop culture references, classic rock music and demon-hunting is pure television-as-escapist-entertainment, and (wisely) seems to have no pretensions beyond being a fun TV show about two buff twenty-something brothers on an endless monster-hunting road-trip.

The fifth (and possibly final) season is by far the most ambitious yet, as at the end of last season the Winchester brothers managed to inadvertently trigger the apocalypse. In the first two episodes the end of days has remained fairly low key, but with Lucifer now walking the Earth and the arrival of the first of the four horsemen, trouble is definitely brewing.

For all that I was a bit disappointed when, at the start of the fourth season, the show's previously rather darker mythology was retconned into a far more traditional Judeo-Christian setup with the introduction of angels, I have to give the creative team behind the show credit for running with it. I still have some concerns (most notably the new season's introduction of the ultimate deus ex machina in the form of God Himself), but for now am looking forward to seeing how it all turns out.

(If you're new to the show, though, I would say that Season 5 probably isn't the best place to start - more than enough mythology and character history has accumulated over the previous four seasons that you'd be better off going back to the beginning via the wonders of DVD.)

The Vampire Diaries Season 1
The CW's new show, The Vampire Diaries, seems to be a fairly transparent attempt to cash in on the preposterous success of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series of teen-vampire romance novels (which I admit I haven't read), or at least the movies based on them (the first of which I have been unfortunate to watch). It's apparently based on a series of novels by L J Smith that pre-date the Twilight series (which I haven't read either), but the basic set-up of 'girl meets nice vampire and falls in love, becoming entangled in a battle between nice vamp and nasty vamp' is essentially the same.

The first two episodes weren't awful, but neither were they particularly interesting or gripping in any way - better perhaps than the turgid, angst-ridden self-importance of the fangless Twilight movie, but far less than might have been hoped for from writer and exec producer Kevin Williamson, who wrote the Scream trilogy.

With its pretty cast of twenty-somethings playing teenagers and the evident success of the Twilight series, I can't escape the suspicion that it'll be a big hit for The CW, but unless it picks up considerably in the next few episodes it'll never be a patch on True Blood or Buffy.

Fringe Season 2
The first season of J J Abrams, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci's Fringe, in which an FBI agent teams up with a former government scientist of questionable sanity and his son in order to solve a bizarre terrorist attack and becomes enmeshed in a far larger and more complex conspiracy referred to as 'the pattern', got off to a somewhat uneven start. Fortunately, the brilliant performance of John Noble as the unhinged Dr Walter Bishop kept me watching, and over the course of the season the show found its feet and started to carve its own unique identity, separating it from the inevitable comparisons with both The X-Files and Abrams' previous hit, Lost .

The good news is that the confidence gained towards the end of the first season seems to have carried through to the second. The first episode, 'A New Day in the Old Town', picks up where the first ended but hits the ground running, threatening the life of a major character and killing off an underused but likeable supporting cast member while still managing to give a good overview of the show for newcomers and signalling a potential shift up in gear for the whole season. It wasn't perfect - a new recurring character was introduced in a way that was useful for the structure of the episode but gave no compelling reason to have them stick around, and poor Jasika Nicole's Astrid Farnsworth remained little more than a gofer - but it was a solid first episode, and Walter is still the finest mad scientist to grace the small screen. I'm already looking forward to seeing what happens next week.

Comments

[Clare W]

Fringe is so ludicrous it's genius. But what about the return of Californication? Are you not taken by the wonderful character of Hank Moody?

[AndyB]

I quite enjoyed the first season, but haven't caught up on the second yet. Will get around to it - one of the few advantages of being jobless is that it gives me a lot of time to catch up on TV and movies. =)