jencat | oh lordy, what have they done...

So, last year I was kinda raving about the one-off of Being Human. And, yay, they commissioned a series, finally.

And the little weblet prequels were kinda fun - Mitchell being 60s!Vamp and Annie going all Blair Witch, very amusingly- but the actual thing?

I'm not exactly loving it so far.

The recasting, and the whole 'lighter, younger, funnier' thing - so far it feels careless, and rushed, and shallow. There's no intro anymore - Annie's already part of the gang, so there's no real explanations, and they totally wasted the gag about the obsessive tea-making that was kinda charming and creepy last time. She gets a voiceover at the beginning, I think (missed most of it while I was working out whether to watch lost instead. Thankfully.)

George... not scary any more. Sadly. Even when he's wolfing. And over-acting hugely, gah.
The new Mitchell's cute, but... not really scary any more either. Even more sadly.
The new Annie's... a bit too normal, really. There's a funny moment with the pizza delivery guy at the beginning, but she's not nutty enough. Dammit.

The original started with George wolfing out, and winding up stealing from various clothes lines, which was, ironically, funnier than the Primeval-style farce we got treated to, where George's hospital basement 'changing' isolation room gets taken over by builders and he ends up running around the woods tryinng to find somewhere to change, except then he just keep tripping over all the random people out in the woods... Soundtracked by (I think) Arctic Monkeys 'They say he changes when the sun goes down'. Subtle.

Should I be surprised they've stripped out all the stuff that caught my attention last time? There's no talk of death being 'men with sticks', and this version of George isn't about to start ranting about the two different jugular veins.. More's the pity.

There's lots of whining but no real darkness; no true angst. It now has lots of the reasons why I didn't make it past the first ep of Demons (which... sucked. What a shock.) and very little left of the fun stuff; the cool, twisted, dark stuff.

Bugger.

And now Lost is on, and it's already entertained me more in about three minutes than Being Human managed in an hour. Go figure. And only 34 episodes left to go...