Having ethnically disparaged The Cult, sight unseen, along strictly racial lines*, the inhabitants of Fortress Mamea have watched the first two eps.
For me, the greatest sin of any homegrown show is try-hard self-consciousness – and thankfully, there’s none here whatsoever**. It looks and sounds like a real TV show, rather than something we should watch out of patriotism. The direction and cinematography are uniformly flashy. The characters are clearly delineated. The plotting is pacey and the dialogue largely on point with only occasional excursions into exposition.
But I’m not feeling for any of the characters. Why am I not caring for:
- a father who wants his sons back at any cost (and, so far, without much thought)?
- a bitchy sister who keeps needling her brother’s wife-with-a-shameful-history?
- or the brothers inside the compound, in too deep and with seemingly nowhere to run?
And what’s the deal with the mercenary hired by the outside group? If he’s really an ex-SAS soldier, he’s being awfully reticent and docile. A character with a skill set like his is a game changer: the rules of engagement may differ (it’s not a warzone so killing people isn’t a good idea) but the game is the same – if your objective is to get certain people out of a compound, then you do everything and anything to achieve that objective. Instead, he’s rolled on and off screen like a prop, as and when the story dictates.
Ep three screens tomorrow, and The Goddess has given me the hard word: If this doesn’t get any better, you’re on your own.
Oh dear.
POSTSCRIPT: OMFG – The Cult‘s section on the TVNZ website has a writers blog where creator Peter Cox shows some of the development process that went into the show.
* When I posted that, I couldn’t help flashing on this joker from the underrated Undercover Brother.
** No surprise, really: creator Peter Cox was behind both the near-perfect The Insiders Guide to Happiness and the excellent but abysmally scheduled The Pretender.
Hey David! Let me know how she gets on!
We focus more on the characters as the series goes on, kinda trading what we know about them already with what’s different about them in their past life… leading onto how any why they became involved with the current situation… so it’ll be interesting to see if knowing more about them increases or decreases their likeability :)
Fair cop about Hugo.
Hey, I have my own tag! :O
GAH! a comment from the show’s creator! thanks for dropping by, Peter.
just finished watching the third ep… and i’m on my own.
one is the loneliest number.
ahh well, you can’t please all the people all the time.
no, you can never please everyone at any given time. (Three Dog Night-quoting aside, i’ve enjoyed The Wire and The Shield on my lonesome so i shouldn’t pine so much.)
i’m curious: how much attention are you paying to the show’s ratings, the tv critics, and online chatter/rants?
I normally don’t pay a lot of attention, but I’ve especially paranoid about this show and what people would make of it, so I’ve been on the look out a lot more. I definetely try to avoid most forums of the ‘your views’ type, just because the amount of idiots depresses me too much. Though that’s true of pretty much any topic not just TV :)
why the paranoia with this one?
d’oh. Actually in all honesty I can paranoid and pretty much constantly worry about reviews and online chatter all the time. However, I was trying to pretend I’m normally too cool to worry about those things…