'being human' (BBC + vampire/ghost/werewolf): anticipate?

> loved Terry Wogan talking through the telly.

this was too much like Life On Mars

SPOILERS kinda... OMG this is at some kind of peak right now. I don't quite buy all the vampires in a humang world stuff but that is the big problem with the vampire mythos and it's never normally touched on, so it's brave that they're tackling it head on, and the AA group is a really neat idea. Annie's story seems to have resolved really quickly so be interesting to so where it goes next. But the real highlight is George, going from :D tourette's to :O full on psycho.

Some good humour too, as well as the tourette's, I loved 'the real hustle' bit last week.

yes, this is so good it's kinda wasted on bbc3 (9 on a sunday night too, odd slot)

Forgot about this, then caught up with the first three eps of s2 over the weekend. Really enjoying it. Most notable thing: the dialogue is 100% credible, stuff-British-people-in-2010-actually-say idioms, "proper" swearing like people IRL actually do etc. As the missus said: "None of it made me look up and go, 'nobody talks like that ffs'," which is absolutely crucial if they're going to take us on the rest of their crazy ride. Loving it, basically.

There needs to be more love for this show, I think it might be my favourite thing on telly. Charlie OTM about the dialogue, it's so natural. I didn't realise the writer was the guy who did No Angels, which was similarly excellent at having people talk the way people actually talk rather than the way people talk in TV shows.

yeah i wouldn't be able to kill any vampire that looked like Mitchell either...

Major lolz at Annie's George impression at the ghost baby. All of their stories are really developing in terms of trying to grasp what normality they can (and failing dismally for the most part) AND they've commissioned a third series so they don't have to wrap it all up in three episodes.

and an america remake too! :/

n

am going to pretend that's not happening, tbh. why the fuck have they renamed their channel SyFy? (actually have just googled why, and it doesn't matter, it still looks shit)

Also mean to say, the bit with the paedophile guy explaining his paedophilia to Mitchell in the terms that Mitchell himself used to describe his own vampireness was quite uncomfortable, and I love that things like that can sit alongside them talking shit about The Real Hustle and all the emotional Annie stuff and a whole ton of actual real lolz and then some pretty gruesome murdery stuff.

Yeah i think that's what i love most too - how well they manage to handle the banal, domestic stuff alongside the gore, like the three of them fighting over house chores and grocery shopping, George unexpectedly bonding with Hugh the barkeep... and how the supernatural stuff bleeds into all that without seeming completely contrived.

wish the US would stop making remakes of UK shows - is it really that much cheaper to remake a show than to just buy them? but I guess they all have this "if The Office worked..." mentality.

and an america remake too! :/

I'm only up to s1e4, but I've been kind of wishing it was an american show instead of a british one, because it feels like it's having to ultra compress its stories to fit them into a 6 episode series, and they could've been a lot more weighty if they'd had 24 eps to spread them over. Like, the who-killed-annie revelation would've been quite a shocker if I'd been watching for 3 months already, but after 3 episodes it was just "ah, ok". That Gilbert character could've had quite a moving exit if I'd met him more than an hour earlier. Mitchell making friends with the kid across the road felt awkward and weird because they had to squeeze it into the first 20 minutes of the episode. etc etc. Not that this means a remake is a good idea, obviously. I just wish we gave our drama a bit more breathing space over here.

Most notable thing: the dialogue is 100% credible, stuff-British-people-in-2010-actually-say idioms...As the missus said: "None of it made me look up and go, 'nobody talks like that ffs'"

This is true and great, but it's almost jarring in itself. At one point somebody said "I need a wee" and I did kind of look up and go "nobody on tv talks lke that!"

There is a difference, I guess, in that we (the UK, rest of the world) are likely to get way more of their references than they would of ours, so there is more of a danger of something being lost in translation if it's not remade for a US audience.

xp yeah I've thought about that, a measly 6 or 8 episodes vs an often unpalatable 24. 12 would be a nice compromise.

Yeah 24 episodes run the risk of having too many filler episodes - the 12-14 episode run is the best imo. More concerned that it's going to be on SyFy tbh, not a channel usually known for quality productions. suppose it depends on who they hire for writers.

wish the US would stop making remakes of UK shows - is it really that much cheaper to remake a show than to just buy them? but I guess they all have this "if The Office worked..." mentality.

I don't think it's a question of cost, Hollywood just seems to believe that the US market could not understand or relate to anyone who doesn't speak and look exactly like they do.

yeah and i guess there are certain things that UK shows can do that US shows can't - not sure where Syfy stands on nudity, but I can't imagine any US channel, HBO included, being able to show e.g. the kid watching the vampire porno scene.

BBC America showed it. (unless it was edited all to shit)

I'm still a couple of episodes behind but the bit with George and Mitchell freaking the fuck out after realising they'd missed The Real Hustle was great.

What channel did True Blood go out on in the US? There's a lot of nudity and gore in that, from what I've seen (half an episode).

HBO...the channel synonymous with boobs + swearing. (ie Same channel that aired Deadwood & Sopranos)

was thinking more that there was a kid involved but then i remembered that The Wire had lots of scenes with children and guns... so i guess kids and porn isn't that much of a stretch?

i still don't know what SyFy's like wrt to things like nudity and violence anyway.

I made the mistake of watching the pilot first, and man, do I prefer the casting/acting/directing - even the accents! - of the pilot to the first episode of the first series. Kind of bummed, but I still want to give it time.

I don't remember the pilot but this makes it look way more lol goth than the series proper:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BeingHumanPilot.jpg

does wikipedia block copyrighted images?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BeingHumanPilot.jpg

Finished S1, that finale was RUB.

How so?

Inconsistency of tone, pace, characterisation. All out of the blue too, it'd been fine up to the end of E5. Eg That scene where George vists the priest and seems to leave with a new found sense of confidence...but then in the very next scene he's blubbing at the kitchen table about being scared. The ghost lady suddenly getting superpowers was clunky. The fact they'd been building up to something huge for the whole season, only to switch to "ah, if we just kill their leader it'll probably all die down again". And a few other bits and bobs along those lines. Didn't hate it enough that I don't want to carry on with S2, but it was definitely a sudden and surprising dip in quality.

I like batshit morally ambivalent vampire dude. "Tonight, we're listening to Miss Kate Bush" - of course you are you big goth.

am now just catching up and bummed that ^^this guy is dead. dude was the only non-annoying vamp around.

he was great. i didn't catch how mitchell survived?

yeah me neither. he said ivan saved him... how, i don't know. chalking it down to being human logic (anyone who can tell me the exact extent of annie's powers - whether she's a poltergeist or not, if and when she lost/gained any of her haunting powers - gets a cookie).

Ivan jumped on top of him to shield him from the explosion.

I do not understand Annie's powers, like the randomness of who she is visible to, and why her clothes change in small ways but she's doomed to stay forever in a grey cardigan, leggings, white t-shirt/vest and big boots, albeit infinite variations thereof. And how she can carry solid mugs but still walk through walls and stuff. And how she, for example, must still wash her hair and whathaveyou.

i think up until her bad boyf tried to drag her over, she'd become visible to everyone. now she's back (for unclear reasons admittedly) to only being visible to other paranormals. even the psychic stageshow guy couldn't see her.

i saw the bit where ivan jumped on top of him and it still made no sense to me as to how mitchell survived. that was a massive explosion.

Annie's visible to other supernatural beings and once upon time was also visible to humans before she almost got dragged through the door? it seems like everytime the door appears she becomes more of a ghost, and the longer she goes without seeing it the more solid/human she becomes. but then there's too many inconsistencies in between for that to be true too so... *shrugs*.

It was the bit where she made the wee origami thing for her mum that got me thinking about her carrying cups of tea around - would it just look like a floating cup of tea to a normal venturing into the house?

Also, the clocks always go back on a Saturday night/Sunday morning. Do they have parents' evenings on a Sunday nowadays, do they?

(I don't really care though. I still love this show.)

Yes, that annoyed me too! But I am easily annoyed. It is the last episode tomorrow, and this makes me very sad.

What the hell happened at the end of Episode 8?

I don't know!

Really liked the ending, but it's scoring a 9 on the WTF-O-Meter

Just watched this, actually shout WHAT THE FUCK? at the telly. Apparently pouring blood on dead vampire bones makes them live vampires ("like, why didn't they do that before?" says my resident vampire expert), but, y'know, it was totally fucking random and WTF-tastic.

The Annie stuff was heartbreaking (though I did burst out laughing when she whooshed in the door and ran Kemp back through it, because it was basically rubbish. Is Lucy a ghost now - that was meant to be her door, right?)

The really heartbreaking bit was Annie in the TV screen apparently trapped in an endless secretive bureaucracy.

Was that Eric who came out of the earth at the end then?

Herrick? aye, it was.

Every Annie thing was a tearjerker tonight, the scaredness at what was going to happen, her "suicide note", the boys crying at her through the screen, "don't forget me". Am sniffling a little bit just thinking of it.

Would have though Ivan would have been the more obvious candidate for revival, tbh

But, then again, maybe being blown to bits doesn't make him as easy to put back together. I dunno. I need to learn more vampire stuff.

I would assume Crazy Mitchell brought Herrick back to wage all out war? Felt a bit tacked on, seeing as ending with George and Mitchell staring into the TV screen and vowing to get her back would have been a great ending. This was a bit naff, you kind of need to understand a cliffhanger in order to care about it.

("like, why didn't they do that before?" says my resident vampire expert

I'm assuming, since it was Mitchell as hid the bones, he was keeping it a secret (since he was trying to keep the vampires under control), but then in ep 7 when he thought "Fuck it, let's kill everyone", he told Daisy where to find them.

xpost

Also also also, was Herrick all werewolfy? Because George killed him, aye, so he could have caught werewolf from him?

It felt like the WTF bits they always fling in in Heroes that they really don't need to do. Dudes, we were going to watch the next series anyway!

Scariest bit was Annie McBride in the chamber, and I liked the general Silent Hill style of the climax in the facility. People being dragged into helldoors is always worthwhile, less convinced about the afterlife as bureaucracy.

PHIL DAVIS. Also, Hal going bonkers because he can't clean the house.

I watched this with someone who had never seen the show before and found myself squirming with mild embarrassment. The format feels tired at this point and the WWII scenes were awful. General feeling of 'here we go again' about the whole thing.

I liked Alex's take on the reality of being dead, but the rest of it didn't do too much for me. Though it was late and I was not entirely sober nor awake.

well this is ticking over ok, anyone see the trailer afterwards for the zombie thing though?

Not really feeling it so much these days, mostly due to Phil Davis sitting around cackling. Didn't really know what to make of zombie trailer, but it's zombies, so we'll probably watch anyway.

anyone watch the 'new zombie thing'?

could've been a black mirror episode i think (have only seen 75%)

forgot all about it. will try and give it a spin this week.

so what about the being human inception/blade runner ending?

I stopped watching this after Aidan Turner left, but now I'm catching up on the last two series on Netflix. I really like the new cast and the much darker tone of the whole thing, but it's weird how much television for younger people has changed even in the couple of years since this was made: it's so white and hetero and male. The female stories are about looking after people and making stuff better, while the male storylines are about killing and being heroes. And most of the vampires' victims are attractive young women.