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Being Human - S2; So, a vampire, a werewolf, and a ghost share an apartment....
Topic Started: Jul 27 2010, 11:59 AM (343 Views)
KMInfinity
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I know we had a thread on this last summer...

This was very very good.

Love the final lines....lol

Quote:
 
Monster trio begins 2nd season of being 'Human' and a hit
Monday, July 26, 2010
By Glenn Garvin, McClatchy Newspapers

If you think the concept of "Being Human," the BBC's surprise hit series about a vampire, a werewolf and a ghost sharing an apartment, sounds ridiculous, the people who make the show take exception. They think it sounds contemptibly stupid, beneath even the lowest conception of television dignity, unwatchable and even unmakeable.

"I laughed ridiculously about it when they suggested it," says Lenora Crichlow, the 25-year-old actress who plays the ghost, Annie. "To be honest, my reaction was, 'Are you SERIOUS?' I take my acting quite seriously. I'd just quit a heavy drama. This sounded like an absurd joke."
'Being Human'

When: 10 p.m. Saturdays on BBC America

And it was, kind of. Toby Whithouse, the show's creator, had filled entire cemeteries with discarded "Being Human" scripts. The one Crichlow saw had been written in the giddy certainty that it would never be produced. "By the last one, I just assumed the show would never be made," Whithouse admits. "And the moment I realized that, it completely liberated me. Nothing I've ever written was ever easier."

But "Being Human," which returned to BBC America at 10 p.m. Saturday, turned out to be anything but the campy, supernatural rip-off of "Three's Company" that everybody expected. Instead, it's a wistful, witty and sometimes quite scary meditation on whether life is wasted on the living. Even more surprisingly, it's a (pardon the expression) monstrous hit -- not only in Great Britain, where outraged fans thwarted a BBC attempt to cancel it, but also on this side of the Atlantic, where it pulled in some of the highest ratings in BBC America history last year.

Even now, as the channel has launched the show's second U.S. season, nobody who works on "Being Human" can quite believe its success.

"It had never really occurred to me that the show might air in the United States," Whithouse says. "One doesn't want to tempt fate. It had already been a long and exhausting process getting it to the screen. I was just grateful anyone was watching it and enjoying it. A life beyond that, I didn't want to think about it."

TV shows that go bump in the night are hardly a novelty in American television; from The CW's "Vampire Diaries" and "Supernatural" to ABC's "The Gates" to CBS's "Ghost Whisperer," TV has more fangs and phantasms than you can shake a crucifix at. What distinguishes "Being Human" from the werewolf pack is the way the characters' struggles with their supernatural sides complicate the ordinary romantic and workplace dramas of 20-somethings.

Annie the ghost has to stand by, jealously and invisibly, watching her old boyfriend take up with another girl. George the werewolf (played by Russell Tovey) must explain to landlords why the furniture is reduced to a heap of kindling every time there's a full moon. And Mitchell the vampire (Aidan Turner) no longer dates because his kisses inevitably result in something much more gruesome than hickeys.

Their relations with God are even more problematic. When George tells Annie he's no longer an Orthodox Jew and can eat bacon, she inquires, "Do they have rules about being a werewolf as well?" George, his mordant wit wrapped around a core of despair, replies: "I think you'd be hard pressed to find a religion that doesn't frown on it."

Even after the show's wildly successful first season in Great Britain, Whithouse and the cast were morose about its prospects in the United States. When they went to San Diego last year to publicize the U.S. launch at Comic-Con, a convention of fantasy and sci-fi fans, they expected, at best, an indifferent reception.

"We were stunned by just how many people had already seen it, getting hold of episodes on the Internet somehow," Whithouse says. (That's not the only thing he still marvels at: "Coming down to the hotel lobby seeing women of a certain age dressed as Princess Leia was something of a shock.")

He hopes those fans will be as pleased with the second season of "Being Human" as they were with the first.

For all its complex characterization, the show also features powerful plotting. The first season revolved around an incipient revolt by a vampire underground disgusted with human control of the world. ("We left them to tend this paradise, this Eden," the vampire leader ranted. "And look what they did.")

This year the threat against "Being Human's" characters will come from the opposite direction: a religious group that has learned of the supernatural shadow world and is determined to wipe it out.

"This is in no way a statement about religion," Whithouse says. "But if people believe in an invisible, omniscient, all-powerful being, then it's not that big a leap of faith to believe in vampires and werewolves and ghosts. If you believe in God, you have to believe in the devil -- and his agents.

"The human villains of this story line believe that vampires are demons, and ultimately they believe they are doing good by wiping them out. The most interesting thing about villains is when they don't believe they're doing evil, they think they're helping the world get better."

Whithouse and the cast are happy to talk about the second season, which has already aired in Great Britain. But ask about the third, which is about to begin shooting, and the phone line from London falls silent as a tomb. Crichton is perfectly willing, though, to talk about what she doesn't want to see: an all-musical episode, one of the most popular suggestions on "Being Human" fan message boards in England.

"Listen, there's a reason that not everybody is writing series for television," she snorts. "The idea of putting a musical together is the most terrifying thing I can imagine. The support for that has just been ridiculous. I can't imagine a TV show doing that."

Crichton lapses into silence when a reporter tells her that "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" did just that in a 2002 episode.

"Good God," she murmurs. "Don't breathe a word of that to anyone here."
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10207/1074989-67.stm
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KMInfinity
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S3 begins on BBC America. This is vastlly superior to the Syfy americanized version. (How sick is it that Syfy thinks there is a market for their version to run concurrent with the BBC hit. If Syfy's version does well, I'll be soooo pissed.)

The S3 premiere was great. The actors are outstanding, especially Russell Tovey as angsty werewolf George. The purgatory scenes were sometimes too mundane, but the dialog was excellent, a nice balance between gothic melodrama and post-modern wit. The scenes with them dealing with the real estate agent were hilarious.

official site
http://www.bbcamerica.com/content/369/index.jsp

overview
http://press.bbcamerica.com/program.jsp?id=23982




Edited by KMInfinity, Feb 27 2011, 08:19 PM.
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