TV - Bedlam

I am a total sucker for ghost shows. I will watch any of them at least once. Maybe twice if nothing better is on. And I love British stuff. So a fictionalized account of actual deaths and ghosts in an historic British landmark is sort of exactly what I want out of life. Unfortunately, TV is created for the largest common denominator of any group, so my ghost shows get filled with quasi attractive, almost talented twenty-somethings, all of whom are at least half as interested in screwing as they are in dealing with the undead. Meanwhile, I go to sleep crying into my copy of The House on Haunted Hill and let the Erlkonig lull me to sleep.

The Premise

Bedlam Asylum has been closed for years after a scandal revealed the abuse of patients. The Asylum has been locked away for years, just sitting and taking up space, until the descendants of the last owner take over the property, creating a brighter future for the historic building by turning it into apartments.

(Raise your hand if you've heard a story like this before.)

The family patriarch is overseeing the remodeling, while his daughter and her friends live in one of the finished flats. In the premiere episode, we see him gifting his daughter with a ring which the crew pulled from the wall of the asylum.

(Raise your hand if you can taste the impending fail.)

In what will likely become a weekly formula, chaos ensues as skeptical people make elementary mistakes in the wake of an ghosts.

(Raise your hand if you want a Scooby Snack.)

And yet, I'm still watching.

The Characters

I am henceforth dubbing the cast as a whole Pretty-Prissy-People-With-Posh-Accents-And-Poltergeist-Problems until further notice. All individual characters will be given fake names until such a time as they warrant my giving a crap about them.

The main character, Sir Broods-A-Lot, broods frequently and is possibly even worse at deflecting questions about his ability to see ghosts than Melinda Gordon. Granted, he didn't have an awesomesauce grandmother to guide him through his powers (we don't think). Instead, he had an adopted family that thought he was crazy and an embarrassment, and eventually shipped him off to a nut house where he was pumped full of crazy-be-gone pills to try stop him from seeing all that ghost crap that made the family look bad. Unfortunately for them, the hospital gave him a clean bill of health, and decided he really didn't need any medicine since he wasn't crazy, and sent him on his merry, socially awkward but hot way. He still sees ghosts though, so the boy still has no credibility. The actor didn't have a lot to work with in the premiere; I can't quite tell if he actually acted the part of shy, reclusive, but goodhearted and earnest psychic, or if that's just what I read into the character. Anyway, he's kind of hot, so even if this show tanks, we'll probably see him again in some other BBC show - because God knows there are only ten actors in the whole of Britain.

Princess Snobby Slut is the cousin of Sir Broods-A-Lot, and she is snobbish and a bit of a slut. Don't believe me? Within the first ten minutes of the show, she seduces her male flatmate, knowing her other flatmate has a thing for him, mainly to prove that she can and to screw with the heads of all who know her. When Sir Broods-A-Lot bursts in during their foreplay to save her dumb butt from impending ghost-smiting, she is quite put out, and proceeds to make everything awkward for everybody. Forever. She does this again the following morning by completely dismissing the flatmate she'd been dry-humping only hours earlier. We learn through her other flatmate that this is rather typical behaviour from Princess Snobby Slut, and I am left wondering why I should care about her survival at all. Because I really, really don't. I can only hope that the writers have one hell of a character development arc planned out for her, otherwise I'm voting that she gets offed in the season finale. Of course in a series like this, there's a good chance they'd bring her character back as a ghostly adviser with a chronic case of stupid-bitchitis. Every genre has its' abused deus machinas.

Mr. Milktoast is the flatmate PSS seduced at the beginning of the show. Despite the kind of sleazy and assholish overtones his character was introduced with, I actual got to like him as the episode progressed. Suffering some kind of survivors guilt two years after the death of his brother, I can attribute his otherwise uncharacteristic interest in PSS as some part of his emotional trauma. Whether because he's still grieving or because he is supposed to be a nice guy, MM is the first character to really try get SBAL(look, typing out all these names gets hard after a few paragraphs) to talk about his ability and believe that he's not crazy. He and SBAL are going to be bros someday soon, I just know it.

Clueless Kitten is like Brittany Murphy's character in Clueless (you see what I did thar?). She's sweet, naive, totally out of her element, and everybody dumps on her because her spine is made of a single strand of candy floss. I'm really hoping she's just going to snap one day and stab PSS in the twat. Though given her proclivities as we see in later episodes, PSS might just be into that.

Finally, we have the dark, evasive, more than slightly menacing building owner who has taught his daughter, PSS, all she knows about being a snobbish slut. I really want to see more of him and his menacing hint dropping, but I fear that if BBC headed my wishes and made him a bigger character at this point in the show, he would lose his evil, pinch-faced, condescending charm.

Plot Devices and Other Points of Interest

Apparently, Sir Broods-A-Lot is notified of impending danger by supernatural text messages. I want to mock this, but one of my favorite shows involves an alien traveling through time and space in a police phone booth, so I really can't say anything. Judgement shall be withheld until further notice.

And where the heck does SBAL get his broody, psychic powers? That stuff doesn't just come out of nowhere - at least, it doesn't in GOOD fiction. While ep. 3 gave us part of the answer, there has to be more and revealing it all in season one would be disappointing. LEAVE US WANTING MORE, BBC! And was there an ulterior motive in SBAL's adoption? Given who it was orchestrated by, I would not be surprised at all.

Who the heck keeps warning SBAL about PSS? Why do they want her to live? I certainly don't.

On a related note, there are a group of messages SBAL keeps receiving that are frighteningly contradictory, as though there are two forces, one trying to get him to stay to help a female character, and the other telling him it's no use and to go away. This intrigues me and it should intrigue you too. It is one of the more potent foreshadowing tools and it keeps me coming back.

The last owner of the facility, when it was still an asylum, was removed from his position and was in the process of being brought to trial for rampant abuse of patients. However, he died before he could be tried. I smell a finale enemy.

To explain the growing paths of UST would require a wall and a few balls of multicolored yarn to map and explain. If we could just get some solidity on just ONE of these, I would be the happiest girl. But being confronted with all of them on top of the plot makes it very hard to explain to my brother when he asks me what's going on.

Final Thoughts

They have already tried my patience by killing a cat. But there are enough things going on that make me curious and keep me entertained that I'm going to continue watching until they either jump the ghost shark or kill another kitty.

Book Review: Beauty Queens

Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's a new review post!

Extended exposure to this cover has lessened its' appeal dramatically. Cool concept, but....

From Goodreads:

The fifty contestants in the Miss Teen Dream pageant thought this was going to be a fun trip to the beach, where they could parade in their state-appropriate costumes and compete in front of the cameras. But sadly, their airplane had another idea crashing on a desert island and leaving the survivors stranded with little food, little water, and practically no eyeliner.

What's a beauty queen to do? Continue to practice for the talent portion of the program--or wrestle snakes to the ground? Get a perfect tan--or learn to run wild? And what should happen when the sexy pirates show up?

Welcome to the heart of non-exfoliated darkness. Your tour guide? None other than Libba Bray, the hilarious, sensational, Printz Award-winning author of A Great and Terrible Beauty and Going Bovine. The result is a novel that will make you laugh, make you think, and make you never see beauty the same way again.

The plot wasn't one that Libba bray came up with on her own. As she freely admits, David Levithan pitched it to her and she latched onto it like a leech to a medieval invalid. Okay, bad gross analogy, but not so wrong that I'm going to delete it. I'm not sure how much impact it has on the quality of an authors' work to be given an idea rather than creating it themselves. But when I compare this with her own original works, well....

Full disclosure: I feel weird writing this review, because Libba Bray has long been one of my favorite authors. I feel REALLY weird admitting that after getting about halfway through, I had no desire to finish it. I feel the MOST weird because I've met her a couple of times and she is one of the nicest, coolest people ever and deserves as much admiration as can be provided. But I can't deny that this is, without a doubt, my least favorite of Libba Bray's books. Let it never be said that I am not honest, even in the face of my idols.



My Issues:

There were a couple of problems with Beauty Queens, the first of which starting with the concept itself. It's funny. It's absurd. These are things Libba Bray is good at, as evidenced by Going Bovine. But it lacked the morbid and sobering heart of GB; the main character was dying and there was no cure. This isn't to say that Beauty Queens isn't morbid - it's a story about pageant contestants trapped on an island after their plane crashed and killed everyone else - , but that fact gets lost in the character drama. And oh, there is SO much character drama. Which brings me to my next point.

There is too much going on. The cast of characters is extensive and pretty much everyone gets their fifteen minutes of fame on the page wherein we see the situation through their eyes. It's too much. We lose track of who's who, and what are they doing, and why are they doing it. Nevermind that interspersed with the character evolutions and heroes journeys and all that, we are nigh bombarded with satire and soapboxy criticisms of consumer culture and gender stereotypes, the presentation of which was funny the first couple times and then got heavy handed and tedious. And we never really get involved in these characters. Halfway through the book, I still hadn't connected with any of the girls. This disconnect was not helped by the fact that it was written in third person narrative.

Third person narration should never, ever detract from a story. But given how Bray writes in first person, I couldn't help but observe that the grace and eloquence she exhibits in her previous novels is lacking in Beauty Queens. This is not to say that the writing is bad, but given the quality I'm used to from her, I can't help but feel she did herself a bit of a disservice writing in third and from so many perspectives.
 
Final Thoughts:

Beauty Queens is a good book (at least from what I read) and I did enjoy parts of what I read. It's very much like a zany adventure movie. People like zany adventure movies. I like zany adventure movies. But I read so that I can really and truly get inside the characters of a zany adventure movie, and on that score, I felt let down. 

Most likely I will pick up Beauty Queens again at a later date. I wonder if the taste phenomena had an effect on my perception of the novel. You know what I'm talking about: you order hot tea and the server brings out cola. Sure, you love cola, but you wanted and were expecting hot tea. You spit it out. There's probably more than a little bit of this going on with me. However, I doubt that my problems with her attempt at third person narration is going to go away. I love third person. Love it like truffles. Love it like brie and baguettes. And this, this was mild cheddar and Wheat Thins.

Libba Bray writes a good book no matter what. This is just a case of whether if would be a good book for me.

My Rating: 3/5 Mushrooms