May 21, 2004

TV Disillusionment

Last week, I learned something that shattered my whole world view. I learned that the Alias writers really do make it up as they go along. OK, so maybe I'm not so shattered, and maybe somehow I'll manage to pick up the pieces and get on with life. Maybe I'm not even surprised. But, dammit, this is NOT the way a continuous TV show should be written.

If you've seen Alias, you know what I'm talking about. Rambaldi artifacts that come from nowhere one week, are desperately important to life on earth, and then are never mentioned again (or worse, are mentioned again in 6 months in a totally different way). "The Passenger." "The Trust." The first half of the season, Lauren was written as a good guy who was there just to keep Vaughn and Sydney apart. Then the writers decided that was boring (oh, and the audience hated her guts), so they made her evil. Without any explanation of why she's evil, or what she wants from the Covenant (her evil organization), or anything else. It's just dumb.

Alias has supposedly been moved to a mid-season replacement and will premiere in January. That's ok with me, maybe it will give the writers time to come up with an actual plan for the 4th season. The 3rd season had a premise (Sydney's missing 2 years), and that's not a plot. Anyway, it just annoys me that they were making this stuff up to make it as open-ended as possible, without any direction or care. PFFT! Oh, and please come back, Syd's mom!

Angel ended last night. Kind of on a cliffhanger, although I guess it's more of a "Believe what you want to see happens next" kind of thing. I believe one of them, and sadly it's probably not Gunn, will survive and show up again sometime somewhere. I bet it takes a lot to kill Illyria, and what with her wanting to do more violence, I wouldn't be in her way.

I just wish there was more good stuff on TV. It's sad, but there probably won't ever be much of it because the networks are run by monkeys who demand instant results. They spend millions of dollars on a new TV show and when it doesn't rank in the top 20 within 3 weeks, they yank it off the air and replace it with some bottom-feeding reality show. I guess TV really is the new opiate of the masses, and the masses are really really dumb.

Published: May 21, 2004
Editor: stacy