Being Human is the story of three roommates who are a ghost, a vampire, and a werewolf. They are consequently so miserable all the time that every scene has sad Dawson's Creek music in the background, but it fails to capture the misery they are all constantly feeling. At one point, the ghost proposes that they watch a movie, and the werewolf says "I thought we were all too tortured to have fun," which is meant as a joke, but is the kind of joke that points to a real weakness in the premise and thereby undercuts it.
These are considered extremely poor form--never doing that is Del Close's cardinal rule--yet the writers gleefully add one or two per episode. Because the writers are terrible. Amazingly terrible.
I got started watching this show as a "mildly hungover, get through the day thing" and it was a fun diversion if you didn't think about it that hard and let yourself get caught up in the werewolf soap opera. Then the Highlanderesque flashbacks to the vampire fighting in the War of 1812 started getting less relevant to what was going on. The werewolf's conversations with his girlfriend started getting longer, despite never moving past variations on "I have a horrible secret and I can't tell you because it's horrible." The rules of the vampire mafia got more and more convoluted but not in that way that inspired any confidence at all that someone had planned this or was indeed writing it all down. Everyone's misery stopped being charmingly overwrought and started being about an unbroken cycle of domestic abuse and ghost date rape. They brazenly ripped off the dumb dumb dumb plot twist from Fight Club without a hint of humor or irony or even switching it up at all and made the reveal play out over two episodes.
But then something amazing happened. The writers completely gave up.
Gut-wrenching melodrama started getting interrupted with jarring fifteen-second bursts of pure slapstick. Characters would just walk onto the scene with no purpose and refuse to leave. Lines of dialogue stopped being related to the things that were said on either side of that line. Major character arcs would be started and then abandoned within the same episode. Best of all, they started throwing in straight-up sitcom plots (whuh-oh, the vampire's new vampire girlfriend is coming over to dinner!)
At the absolute I-had-to-pause-and-ask-if-I-really-just-saw-that nadir, a guy gets possessed by his dead college buddy in a plot to use the dude's body to seduce his ex-girlfriend. When the guy wakes up, the ghost explains that he did it because "[he] had always loved her... and just wanted her to look at [the ghost] the way she looks at [the dude]." Sympathetic music swells. The dude chokes back tears and says "me too."
In short it became a trainwreck, something that fails spectacularly and beautifully. It demands to be watched and reviled.
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir
This was entertaining to read, but you know, Will, you have a capitalization problem. You often don't capitalize proper nouns. Most of the time, no meaning is lost, but I was disappointed upon realizing what this topic was actually about.
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Oh dear. I proofread the ecstatic art rant text but not the topic title. For tha I sincerely apologize.
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir
I too thought this was going to be a topic about like, being a person. But now I really want to watch this show.
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Ocarinakid
At one point they flash back to the 20s and the vampire has the mustache from The Artist. He does a hilarious, over the top "I'm overelocuting but talking really fast because it's the twenties" voice. But he only does it for one scene and then just acts normally. Because he got tired.
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir