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

[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.