Blood Ties

[selenak]

Some time back, ide_cyan recommended the series Blood Ties to me, and I've now watched the first season. With a few caveats, I liked it, for the following reasons:

- the main character and detective around whom the show is centred is a woman, Victoria "Vicky" Nelson, and not the vampire who is also in the cast, which avoids the obvious Forever Knight/Angel comparisons from the get go
- Vicky, while attracted to Henry (that would be the vampire), doesn't swoon over him or abandon all her other ties; her connection to her former partner Mike is presented as strong, and there are reasons unrelated to Henry why they broke up to begin with and don't get together (there are sparks, but they also tend to argue most of the time)
- Vicky is believable competent at what she does; she's also believably an adult woman, and a professional with experience (there is a great scene where Henry is ready to give her an "you've never killed a human being, you don't know what it will do to you" speech, and she calmly tells him that she did shoot a man in her cop years, and no, she won't ever forget it, but she knows she can do it if it's the only way to protect others)
- Vicky's sidekick Corinne (btw, hooray for relationships between two female characters, and while they do occasionally discuss the guys, they mostly talk about the cases) is a geeky goth girl
- Henry earns his living as a comics writer (and -drawer; I have read the first of the novels, and there he writes trashy romances; I can't decide which cracks me up more, and considering Henry's supposed to be Henry Fitzroy, aka Henry VIII. bastard son who died with 17, the whole trashy romace writing just seems sublimely fitting, but I can see why they wanted something visual for a visual medium and hence made the switch)
- Mike is the absolute antithesis to one of my least favourite tropes in either pro or fanfiction, the Insignificant Other, aka the fiance/boyfriend/husband /alternate love interest just there to be dumped for the more exciting bad boy/supernatural guy/romantic hero; see above re: his relationship with Vicky.
- there is a female pathologist who could give Oz lessons in the art of deadpan acceptance of the supernatural and dry humour
- the show has a nice sense of humor

The caveats? Well, let's start with the third episode, aka the voodoo episode, which is just plain embarassing. (Also with a very questionable racial subtext.) Skip it if you want to watch the show, and read Barbara Hambly's series about Benjamin January (starts with A Free Man of Colour) instead. Someimes the production looks really cheap and studio-bound. Also, sometimes all the previous detective and cop shows I've seen make me yell at the screen "but that wouldn't happen, where's the backup!" or procedural niceties like that, which are ignored to heighten the suspense. I could have done without the crazy evil priest as well, but that two parter offered some really good character scenes for Vicky, Mike and Henry, so that didn't make me roll my eyes too much.

All in all, I'll be looking for season 2.

Comments

[lilacsigil.livejournal.com]

Yes, yes and yes. While the production values are...not high and most characters of colour (not all) are drawn in highly questionable ways, the central ensemble is such a magnificent example of how to Do It Right that I want to put them on a poster and send them to every scriptwriter in existence. If you're looking for some fic, marag has some good ones very much in the spirit of the show.

[selenak.livejournal.com]

Oh, thanks for the tip! Yes, I defnitely want to read fanfic now.

[pandarus.livejournal.com]

Aw, I really liked Blood Ties, and was sorry they didn't renew it. For all the reasons cited above. I'm very fond of Tanya Huff's vampire books; I did spend a good chunk of the first episode going: "...but you're too pretty to be Henry! And also, not ginger!" But I got over it. And, yes, I LOVED Mike. Love love love. And Corinne is a delightful addition - I understand they put her in instead of Tony, on the basis that there was some talk of making a TV thing based on the 'Smoke' books, which feature Tony and Henry in Vancouver. Or something.

In addition to the faily bits you mention, I also felt sorry that the setting was so generic with the books I got a vivid sense of place, of Toronto as a distinct city, and I was sorry that they didn't try to do that with the show. Ah well. But I thought it was one of the more successful post-buffy vampire shows. (Although True Blood is my favourite. Even though I like Huff's books MUCH more than Stachouse's books.)

[st-aurafina.livejournal.com]

Blood Ties is an awesome interpretation of the Tanya Huff novels - at first I was sad that they hadn't brought Tony, the gay street kid/informant into the series, but Corinne is a great character and totally won me over on that point. There are some definite fails in the series, but overall, it's so good. I'm seconding marag's Blood Ties fic, she writes excellent gen-ish OT3.

Skip it if you want to watch the show, and read Barbara Hambly's series about Benjamin January (starts with A Free Man of Colour) instead.

*sighs* I automatically opened a tab to check this book out on Amazon. Then I closed it again. #Amazonfail makes me so very sad.

[selenak.livejournal.com]

Me too. Doesn't Australia have other internet book services, though? Because the book series I mentioned is really worth reading. It's set in 19th century New Orleans (long pre Civil War), and our hero/detective, Benjamin January, is, as the title of the first novel says, a free man of colour. Most of the other regular characters are, too, as the series takes its personnel mostly from the free p.o.c.s of that period. January's mother and father were originally slaves, but then his mother became the mistress of a white man who bought and freed her, Ben and his sister Olympe; later on they also had a half sister by their mother's lover. This allows Barbara Hambly to cover the different sections of society; Olympe despises her mother's way and became a voodoo practioner (another regular character is the famous voodoo queen Marie Laveau, which is why I thought of these novels as how you write about voodoo interestingly but without clichés), while the mother is somewhat embarrassed by her two older children as reminders of her time as a slave and has bossed her younger daughter to find a white "patron" as soon as possible. January himself lived in Paris for a while and doesn't find it easy to readjust to New Orleans (and what it means to live as a black man there, free or not). In Paris, he was a surgeon but in New Orleans has to earn his living as a music teacher and fiddler at the balls, to name but one example. There is a great sense of period in these novels, and they demonstrate that you can write about a time where slavery was the norm rather the exception without taking the easy way out (i.e. let all the sympathetic characters be against it, and only the villains for it), AND without prettifying the horror of it in the slightest.

[wee-warrior.livejournal.com]

I liked pretty much the same elements you did, but cringed likewise re: the stereotypes, and finally gave up because it actually bored me as a detective show (not the greatest reason in the world, I know, but I used to be a great fan of those, some of it stuck). I did very much enjoy Vancouver finally starring as Vancouver, though.

[wee-warrior.livejournal.com]

(or rather Toronto as Toronto. Ahem.)

[oracne.livejournal.com]

I mostly enjoyed this series, too. Though I missed Corrine's original, who was male.

[platypus]

Corrine was in the first book -- she just didn't stay on as Vicki's assistant. If you mean Tony, Vicki's informant friend, he didn't really have the Corrine role in the books, but yeah, I missed him a bit too. Huff held him back for a possible series of his own (he did get his own book trilogy), but I think she should've thrown everything she had into this series; it was never going to be such a resounding success that it got a spinoff. (On the other hand, having two strong female characters in prominent roles was really, really nice, and the good-hearted street kid may have seemed like a worse stereotype than the goth girl.)

I admit to liking the books a bit better -- Henry wasn't the stereotypical long-haired pretty-boy vampire in them, though people did tend to find him attractive. And I liked the development the Vicki/Henry/Mike relationship got in the books. But all in all, Vicki's an appealing heroine, and it was nice to see that on TV.

[oracne.livejournal.com]

I loved Tony, and his own books. But Corrine did grow on me. I'd forgotten she briefly appeared in the books!

[ide-cyan.livejournal.com]

Glad you liked it!

All in all, I'll be looking for season 2.

There was only one season, of 22 episodes, but it was divided into two blocks (of 12 and 10 episodes respectively) that were marketed as separate seasons for broadcast on US cable television. (Ie, don't be suprised if the first episode of "season 2" doesn't feel much like a season opener.)

[selenak.livejournal.com]

Yes, I did, so thank you for the tip!

Also thanks for the season(s) explanation. I bought the dvds which here in Germany were marketed as "season 1", and must admit I was a bit surprised that the changeling episode was the season finale...

[ide-cyan.livejournal.com]

Ah -- that's a different split than was done in the US; 1-11/12-22 instead of 1-12/13-22. Episode 11 is the one with the changelings. Episode 12, which ended the first season in the USA, was a bit more fitting as a season finale, and would also probably work a bit better as a season opener (thought it was meant to be neither); the problem with splitting the one season in half is that neither the episode before #12 nor the episode after it make much sense as finales or openers.

ETA: Also, you might get spoiled for episode 12 if you talk about season 1 with people and they also think in terms of the US finale instead of the German one.

[pjferret.livejournal.com]

I miss that show already, and am still bummed they didn't renew it. I thought they did a really good job recreating the books, for the most part. And I loved the addition of Corrine. (I just saw her doing a guest spot on another show the other day - a completely different type of role from Corrine, and I almost didn't recognize her.) But the books were better. If you haven't read them yet, I highly recommend them.

One thing about the books that I missed being incorporated into the show was that Vicky had a serious vision impairment. She wasn't blind, but close to it (especially at night), which was the reason she had quit the police. I thought that added an original angle to her that you don't usually see in a heroine.

[platypus]

That showed up in the first few eps (IIRC, she walked into a garbage can once), but was de-emphasized a bit as it went on.

[pjferret.livejournal.com]

Now that you mention it, I do think I remember them alluding to her eyesight a little at the beginning, and thinking they were downplaying it more than in the books. But yeah, after the first few episodes, it wasn't really mentioned again, other than her wearing glasses. I was a little disappointed, but I suppose that's the kind of omission you'd expect when translating the books to TV. Christina Cox would probably have gotten tired of acting in glasses with coke-bottle lenses and squinting at everything all the time. :)

[ide-cyan.livejournal.com]

Tanya Huff goofed a little bit with the glasses thing when she was writing the books (I know this because she mentioned it herself, either in one of her LJ entries -- she's andpuff -- or when she was blogging about the show for Lifetime). They don't help with retinitis pigmentosa, so there was a line added in for the series (I think it was during the premiere, when Vicki's meeting Henry) about Vicki also being near-sighted.

[pjferret.livejournal.com]

I hadn't realized that, about her goof. I was late in discovering her LJ (I've only had it friended for a couple of months, I think), so I missed out on all of her comments while the show was actually airing. I wasn't familiar with retinitis pigmentosa, so I was going by how the books portrayed it, but after a quick googling, I see what you mean about glasses not helping. I have my own vision disorder (cone dystrophy, which thankfully isn't nearly as bad as RP), so I guess that's why I identified so much with the idea of a visually-impaired heroine.

[redfiona10.livejournal.com]

I loved what I saw of the show, mostly because you want to shake some sense into the various participants in the love triangle with about the same frequency and force. Plus we get a female lead who doesn't moon over people. Have you seen the one with the reincarnated lovers yet? It does some fantastic things with that old trope.

[ide-cyan.livejournal.com]

That's very near the end of the series (and so would be in "season 2").

[neutralalienist.livejournal.com]

Blood Ties! I've seen a few episodes, and I'm currently reading the first book - I'm very, very fond of Vicki.

The Vicki/Henry/Mike triangle is also one of the very, very few love triangles I didn't find utterly tedious.