Supernatural
Well; I haven't finished viewing all of the first season, but I wanted to put down my thoughts about this show here.
Initially I had judged the show without watching it at all. I did not like the pair of pretty boys that had been cast in the league, both of them still look like they should be modelling men's clothing on the runway and posing for Playgirl. Additionally the price of the the DVD boxed set was just too high for me to consider trying it out (£30 for half a season!) so I decided to just give the show a miss. But when the price dropped to £18 for the complete season and Aaron Williams of Nodwick (http://nodwick.humor.gamespy.com) said he was enjoying the show I decided to give it a go. Especially because Aaron has exceptionally good taste in TV shows (liking many of the sames ones I do) and I've always been fond of the horror genre.
I'm approaching the three quarters mark for the first season and I've avoided seeing anything on the web so this has been like watching a show fresh just the way I used to do back before the age of the interwebs came along and provided spoilers for every aspect of life.
Anyway, my thoughts... Where are they? Oh yes, Supernatural. Once I got down to watching it this show has actually quite impressed me, the first thing that clicked with me is the choice of camera filters. The show uses a very dark deep set of filters to keep colours rich, shadowy and dark. A similar style of filters were used in Millenium and I liked the bleak nature of them then. The Supernatural ones are a somewhat cleaner, but they still evoke the same feel and this is a good thing because Millenium made it onto my top 50 list as number 50 (it would have gotten a higher place if Fox hadn't nixed it before it finished). Reminding me of a show a love is a good way to get me on your side. Well done supernatural.
But it's not just the filters on the show that I enjoyed, Supernatural is a rather fun experience. It's not the best show ever, in fact it's very predictable. I often call out lines before the characters utter them as they're using all of the cliches from the horror genre with no shame and that's a good thing.
This is where Supernatural (at least the first season so far) manages to succeed, it doesn't take itself too seriously, you have the stereotypical horror monster of the week, a splash of "where is their father and what killed their mother?" plus some pretty female guest stars and plenty of people who are still skeptics. I can't get over the number of skeptics that live in the Supernatural world, considering the amount of utterly wierd things that seem to happen on a weekly basis and the freaky nature of their world in general it's almost comedic that a lot of the guest characters still remain skeptical, sometimes even in the face of the utterly bizzare.
And that's the crux of it, Supernatural works because it's an amusing parody of a genre
that should never be taken seriously. The show doesn't try and be pretentious, it doesn't want you to take it seriously. It's just two brothers driving around America in a 1967 Chevrolet Impala and stopping strange happenings. Sort of like Scooby Do 2000 or a modern day Call of Cthulhu.
As such, I quite like this show.