Fall '07: "Moonlight" Sucks
I think I just witnessed the Platonic ideal of godawful television shows.
You name it, and the pilot for Moonlight botches it beyond any hope of rescue. Terrible acting, hackneyed dialogue, boring and implausible plotting, cheap special effects, production design that already looks ten years out of date … and just when you think things couldn’t get worse, they start playing an Evanescence song, and the suck factor up and buries the needle. (I’d say “that one overly histrionic and mopey Evanescence song,” but, well, that’s pretty much all of them.) In a show this bad, even the occasional in-joke reference to Hearst College, featured in the late, lamented Veronica Mars, feels like a stake to the heart.
As vampire P.I. Mick St. John — I’ll give you a moment to ponder just how staggeringly dumb that name is, and what it bodes for the show as a whole — Alex O’Loughlin seems to have graduated from the Joey Tribbiani School of Acting. He’s got the quizzical eyebrow-arch down pat, for sure. He makes Paul Walker look nuanced and riveting, but maybe that’s just because he’s acting around his own disbelief at how hokey and cliche-ridden his lines are.
In that regard, I’m not sure we can blame Sophia Myles for the sheer wretchedness of her performance as O’Loughlin’s love interest, a spunky reporter for Generic Web Journalism Site As Imagined By People Who Clearly Have No Idea How Either Of Those Things Actually Work. (You know her workplace is “edgy” because there are flatscreens and big pictures of people’s faces on the walls, and one guy’s riding around on a scooter.) Myles, who did radiant, superb work in Doctor Who’s award-winning “The Girl in the Fireplace,” was a last-minute replacement for, I dunno, some actress who totally dodged a bullet by keeping this show off her resume. I’m guessing Myles must have gotten the script with a day’s notice, tops, learned her lines on the flight across the Atlantic, and gone straight from the airport to the set. Even in standard definition, you can make out the prominent bags under her eyes, and she seems too busy trying (and failing) to maintain an American accent to bring anything resembling depth to the inch-deep material she’s working with.
That seems to be a theme with this show: When Good Actors Go Bad. On Veronica Mars, Jason Dohring struck the perfect balance of bad-boy snark and wounded vulnerability; here, as a whiny Gordon Gekko-styled vampire CEO, you mostly just want to smack him. Shannyn Sosamon was an actual movie star, back in some distant, half-recalled epoch, and I remember her being actually kinda charming. On Moonlight, she’s chewing scenery with her enormous fangs and wrestling around awkwardly with our hero in a soft-focus flashback. Kevin Weisman, Alias’s ubergeek Marshall Flinkman, almost escapes the awfulness, but he’s mired in yet another techno-nerd role, and this one comes across a bit on the pervy side. And these are the good actors brought into replace the original pilot’s gaggle of apparent no-hopers. (I’m hoping CBS has locked up the only copy of that original hour in the same warehouse as the Ark of the Covenant, ‘cause its terribleness just has to reach face-melting proportions.)
Even when the show almost sort of begins to approach cleverness, as with the also-a-vampire coroner who supplies blood to our mopey hero, the effect is ruined by the smug, self-congratulatory way it all comes across. Throw in uniformly lousy, dead-eyed guest actors, an actively boring plot about a sleazebag professor who blathers on about blood and sex and blah blah blah, and an opening talk-show dream sequence as a vehicle for every clunky salvo of Stupid Premise Explanation the writers need to toss in, and you have an hour of your life you’ll desperately wish you could get back.
No wonder one-time showrunner David Greenwalt — veteran of a certain infinitely better vampire-detective series — left the series because of “exhaustion.” I was worn out just trying to contain my disbelief that anything this bad could get on the air. Moonlight sucks the life out of everything it touches. Here’s hoping CBS puts a stake through its heart, and buries this one deep — and facing downward.
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