“Do you want to watch a TV Show with me tonight at ten?”
“Sure,” I said, although I knew I was being tricked.
“It’s new.”
“Are there goblins in it?”
“No.”
I don’t watch TV shows with goblins. Or draculas or monsters of any kind. Which means I don’t watch much TV anymore. And she knew and I knew, saying ‘goblins’ was an umbrella term covering all related categories.
Still, I knew I was being tricked.
A few hours later I came into the bedroom, exactly at ten. “No goblins.”
“No.”
It starts off, if not promisingly, at least not supernaturally. Some fellow is insane and in an insane asylum. There are hokey CGIs of things exploding (apparently in his mind) and that isn’t a good omen. But nowadays you can’t expect to see a show with two people sitting on a park bench and talking. Something always has to blow up.
Of course, a beautiful girl insane person enters. The leading man insane person falls in love at first sight. I’m thinking, ‘OK, David and Lisa updated. Except in this version it’s the beautiful girl insane person who doesn’t like to be touched. Wow. That makes it not embarrassingly derivative anymore.’
And the acting is bad. The leading man insane person doesn’t seem insane to me. Troubled, confused, seeing visions and hearing things, but his core persona isn’t insane at all. He’s rather witty, in a sitcom sort of way. Obviously, the actor isn’t talented enough to make the leap.
The show keeps going and going, it seems to never end. Then it does. Then it doesn’t. The second episode starts without warning. We decide to turn it off, but not before something horrifying happens: she presses the ‘record’ button.
To sum up what I saw: The show was silly, weird. All sorts of loopy things happened, things that made no sense, you couldn’t tell if what was going on was only in the leading man insane person’s head or was really happening. Ho-hum. What an original concept.
I get up to do my just before bedtime routine. That’s a glass of red wine and computer playing. I google ‘leading man in (TV show title)’. It’s some English actor with hefty credentials. Apparently, he’s a really good actor.
How did I get that all wrong? I thought he sucked, didn’t really play an insane person at all well, didn’t have the chops. But he does have the chops.
There was a mystery to be solved. I googled the TV show. Guess what. The character isn’t insane. The character is a comic book character. Some super-hero who doesn’t know he has super-hero powers even though his super-hero powers are ricocheting every which way, so he thinks he’s insane. Eventually, he ‘understands’ his powers and uses them for good.
Or something like that. I don’t care because I don’t watch TV shows with goblins.