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Been looking at the DVD set of the 1st season. I know the general plot, I know Summer Glau guest-starred in the 2nd season, and that's about it. Worth it?
I should point out I loved The X-Files up until season 5 or 6 when it just got silly and boring. Not much of a fan of police procedurals unless there's something else interesting involved (I like The Inside, for example).
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I've only seen the first season, so it's possible that it gets better, but from what I saw it's pretty weak, frankly. It's an interesting premise, but its potential is mostly squandered. The people in it often behave in ways that don't make sense in terms of either their characters or in terms of what a real person would do in situation X, acting in whatever way is necessary to advance the plot. Everything about the show has a flimsy feel to it, to me.
[Edit--if you haven't already seen Taken, it provides a much better take on the old alien abduction story than the 4400 does.]
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I absolutely love The 4400. I liked the miniseries, and I thought it had promise, but the first season went so far beyond the promise of the miniseries that it's hard to describe.
I cared about the people. I cried at the end of one of the episodes. I am dying for the new season to start (I have to wait until June 11, which sucks)
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4400 has a touch of the x-files in the first season. Its a part of Taken and a part of x-files. I really enjoyed the first season. I felt the second season got a little to soap opera where if you missed an episode you didn't know what was going on. But then that is when I stopped liking the x-files too.
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I thought the miniseries was pretty good, but Season 1 started to get all silly, and it just went downhill from there.
As far as supporting former Firefly castmembers go, though, I'm more keen on 24 season 3, where Gina Torres is a contending character in several episodes.
posted
I really like the 4400. It seems like it takes forever between seasons though, so I honestly don't remember a lot of it. I have to say the whole baby thing is an annoying storyline. But other than that I really like how things are shaping up, espcially with all the tension that manifested in the last two episodes of the second season.
Season Three should be a WILD ride. And SPOILER
You learn later on that it ISN'T an alien abduction, actually you learn that in the first season, so anyone who actually saw the whole first season should know that. What you learn in that episode changes the meaning of their purpose and everything. It's not just random alien abduction and testing, it's more focused and pointed.
SPOILER OFF
But I would recommend you watch both seasons. If you don't want to see the third season at the end, then don't force it, but it looks like it's going to get better. Also, the seasons aren't that long.
Edit to add: Summer Glau I swear to god more or less plays River Tam in the one episode she is in.
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posted
Spoilers for The 4400 follow, so be forewarned.
For the past little while I've been writing little mini-reviews of TV shows, movies, books, webcomics, video games, and anything else that catches my fancy. They've really been for myself as much as anything else--I often forget the details in a few months and can't really recall the specific reasons why I felt the way I did about whatever it is I'm trying to think of. I'm probably going to be posting revised versions of some of these at Sakeriver, but that's a different subject.
Anyway, this is what I wrote down after watching the first disc of The 4400 (and it's this that contains the spoiler):
quote:I’ve been somewhat curious about the 4400 ever since I saw Taken, primarily because it seemed a little too similar (from what tiny bit I knew about the 4400) to Taken, and because it stars Joel Gretsch, who also had a fairly major role in Taken. Plus, the number somehow seems kind of Jehovah’s Witness-y, which caught my attention. I’m sure that it’s a coincidence, but it’d be interesting if there was some tie between the Witness belief in the 144,000 who will get to ascend to Heaven, and the 4400 people abducted by aliens (or something) in this show. I doubt that the show is that clever, but you never know.
So anyway, I’m disappointed. Not hugely so—it’s better than, say, the first episode of Smallville*. It’s possible that it’ll kind of find itself and end up being worth watching, but it’s orders of magnitude less involving and real than Taken, Lost, or the new Battle Star Galactica. Everything about it just feels a little flimsy and contrived. An example of this would be the scenario in which Tom Baldwin (played by Joel Gretsch) and his estranged wife are called to the hospital because the doctor detected increased brainwaves in their son, who has been in a coma for years. They show up, the doctor meets them in the kid’s room, and tells them about the increased brain activity. “What does that mean?” They ask. “I don’t know! I’ll have to run some tests,” says the doctor. And that’s that. It’s set up so that Baldwin can pursue his hunch that his nephew is a latter day Jesus when it comes to healing folks. I realize that I’m not explaining this well, but the whole situation just felt very contrived.
I’m interested enough to keep on watching, and I’ll be bumping the next disc up to next place in my Netflix queue, but I’m not utterly thrilled. Right now I’d give it a C+, or possibly a B-.
Sorry that the example isn't more clearly laid out--if I'd been writing this with an audience of anybody other than myself in mind I'd have taken more trouble to make it clear why that scene seemed so flimsy.
*Smallville gets better (and ends up being a much better show than The 4400, in my opinion), but I have no idea how a pilot that crappy convinced anybody to greenlight the show.
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posted
More soap operaish, definitely. Crappier, no. I've only watched through the first disc of the third season, though, so I can't say anything about episodes after that point.
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I was interested in the 4400 (because someone brought it up at GC) so I watched the first couple of episodes. I have a... system... which enables me to watch TV shows at the drop of a hat, almost.
Personally, I thought it was very bad. Interesting, and with the potential, had it been written by someone else, to be excellent... but otherwise very disappointing.
What struck me most was the level of the dialogue and the writing in general was abysmal. Noemon has it right; the scenes are contrived and the motivations are weak. I wrote before that I thought the "rationality of the universe was out of wack."
Other things I wrote before, warning it was part of a rant, so I'm being meaner than I could have been:
quote:I would add the way the scenes come along in a way that's frustratingly slow. I felt like the pilot could have easily been half the length and contained exactly the same amount of information. Additionally, the characters seem overly stupid and uncommunicative about Very Important Information, which makes me annoyed at them.
quote:Oh, and regarding a totally missed opportunity, it could have been very interesting to see the different reactions of the different people to various modern implements, styles etc. We had one scene, silent, of that. One! If the writers want to keep the more important secrets secret for longer, they could have done a little more delving.
That would have added another missing component; humour. Aside from a very few feeble jokes, the potential for funny was ignored complete. I mean, come on, who doesn't want to see a man from the 50s staring at a "space age" computer? Who doesn't want to see a teenage girl from the 80s confused by the fashions? There's so much they simply didn't even go near.
They glossed over it! They barely touched it! It was like it wasn't there! "Weeks Passed" at the beginning. I mean, sure it's not the important part of the show, but it could have been a funny subplot. They had plenty of time. Instead, the gave the lead guy too much (apparantly largely irrelevent) backstory too soon, they repeated the same parametre-establishing things (I'm being deliberately vague now).
Overall, I thought that it was a good idea that had been betrayed by the writing.
About Smallville:
Generally, Smallville is much better than the 4400. The writing and dialogue, although it's not brilliant, is in general far better. The characters, the set-up, the setting, pretty much everything is both interesting and believable.
I made it all the way to partway into the Second Season before I stopped watching. My reasons for doing this were largely to do with the repetative nature of the way the episodes unfolded. It fell into the complex of "nearest and dearest". What "nearest and dearest" is is it means that the hero is constantly saving his friends and family (his nearest and dearest). There would be trouble in Smallville, but it wasn't until someone near and dear to Clark got kidnapped, or involved or otherwise in danger that he'd go zipping off.
I know that there is a certain aspect of this in all shows. We care about our characters and when they are endagered we want our hero(es) to go off and save them. However, when it happens every week it causes two things.
Problem 1) Being that you stop caring or being worried about your main characters in a realistic way. This is a problem because when they're really in danger, we don't get worked up the way that we should. It's just another day.
Problem 2) is more plot related. If Clark Kent wants to help people, surely it does not rely on the fact that his nearest and dearest are involved. Sure, they can be friends with those in danger, they can be at the same dance, store, field, etc.. However, constantly having them as the focus of the mission undermines Clark's mission as said aloud in the show itself.
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