Keeping Up with TV

24 Apr 2013 6 Comments

by Kay Hudson in TV Tags: , , ,

I shouldn’t even be thinking about keeping up with TV.  I have writer friends who’ve sworn off the Box completely, and I’m sure they get a lot more writing done than I do.  I have other friends who insist that they are studying story structure and characterization when they watch.  Both approaches are valid, I’m sure.

I tend to be a loyal viewer myself.  If the promos and trailers for a new show interest me enough, I’ll watch the pilot, and if I like that, the show will probably keep me.  Not always.  I realized last year that I had more episodes of Smash on my DVR than I had actually watched, and I didn’t care about losing them when the DVR died.  I abandoned The Mentalist when I got really, really, REALLY tired of both Red John and Patrick Jane’s behavior.  There have been others.  But usually, once I start watching, I’ll stay around.  Heck, I’m still watching Glee, if only for the music.

I would tell you that I don’t care for violent shows, but I’m a history geek, big fan of Hell on Wheels, and I haven’t missed an episode of the History Channel’s Vikings, an even more violent series, but beautifully filmed and full of interesting characters (especially Lagertha, the kick-butt Shield Maiden wife of the protagonist).

I’m cautious about what I do start watching.  There are any number of light mystery shows on the air (or on the cable) that I have avoided simply because I don’t want to tie up yet another weekly hour. (I do watch Bones, Castle, White Collar and Rizzoli & Isles.).  The same goes for many of the series on SyFy, although I’ve been a science fiction fan forever, loved all the Star Trek and Stargate series (well, some more than others, but still . . .).  I watch Grimm and Once Upon a Time, both of them more fantasy than science fiction, but very entertaining.

Somehow the promos for the new SyFy series Defiance stayed under my radar until a couple of weeks before its premiere, when I noticed an ad on line.  The show promised several elements I enjoy, but I wasn’t sure.  I still feel a bit burned over Terra Nova (time travel! dinosaurs! Jason O’Meara!)–I hate falling for a show that doesn’t make it to a second season.  And I missed the initial showing of the Defiance premiere.  Couldn’t record it because I still haven’t gotten around to replacing my failed DVR.  Missed a convenient showing in favor of a really lovely dinner, and found myself tackling the two hour show at midnight on Friday.  Well, I figured, if this could keep me awake until 2 AM, it was worth a commitment.

Defiance is worth it and then some.  It is, truth be told, in large part a repositioned Western, set thirty years or so in the future of an Earth changed forever by the arrival of no less than seven alien races and their out-of-control “terraforming” (inaccurate use of the term, but we’ll overlook that for the moment).  The protagonist is the loner (although he’s accompanied by his adopted alien teen-age daughter) who wanders into the frontierish town of Defiance (formerly St. Louis, see the Arch over there?) just in time to see the old sheriff die in action.  Yep, pardner, Nolan is drafted/trapped into becoming the new “Lawkeeper.”

The show is full of Western and SF tropes, CGI effects, more or less humanoid aliens, gritty and sometimes spectacular scenery.  There’s the inexperienced (female) mayor, her sister the brothel owner, the patriarch of the mining family (played by Graham Greene, long a favorite of mine), the alien mob boss and his wife (played by Jaime Murray, formerly H. G. Wells on Warehouse 13), who spend an inordinate amount of time in their hot tub, a Romeo and Juliet sub-plot, an acerbic and funny alien female doctor, and lots of disintegrating ships tumbling out of orbit and causing ever weirder changes.

I love it, and the second episode was just as good.  Oh, dear, another commitment.

What shows keep you watching, even when you should be doing something else?

Reading, Writing and Watching

18 Oct 2012 6 Comments

by Kay Hudson in Books, Reading, TV, Writing Tags: , , , , ,

Reading:  If you stop by here from time to time, you’ve probably heard me complain about my lack of reading time.  Nothing’s changed.  I still buy books faster than I can read them.  But I keep at it, and recently I finished reading Lowcountry Boil, a delightful mystery by my friend and Firebird sister Susan M. Boyer.  The heroine, Liz Talbot, is a very modern P.I. who returns to her family home on South Carolina island Stella Maris to invesitgate her grandmother’s untimely death.  Her pursuit of the truth is complicated by a parade of family members and friends, an ex-flame and an ex-husband, a devious cousin and the ghost of Liz’s high school BFF.  It’s no surprise that this Golden Heart finalist made it to publication so quickly.  I recommend it enthusiastically.

Lowcountry Boil introduced me to Henery Press, a new publisher in Dallas, specializing in mystery and suspense fiction, much of it in the cozy/humorous vein I enjoy.  On Susan’s recommendation, I ordered another book, Portrait of a Dead Guy by Larissa Reinhart, which was a finalist in my own West Houston RWA chapter’s Emily contest last year.  That one’s waiting at the top of my priority To Be Read stack.  And isn’t the cover art on these books wonderful?  Stop by the Henery Press site to see more; the books are available as e-books or trade paperbacks.

Writing:  My One Hundred Words a Day loop is jumping again, with quite a few of us back on track, and even trying for 250 words a day.  I’m hard at work on my new Jinn story, and I’ve fired up my enthusiasm with a new piece of software for witers, Scrivener.  I had pangs of envy when Scrivener was a Mac only program, but a few months ago the Windows version was released, so I decided to try it out with a manuscript that was barely started, and therefore easily switched into a new file.  I had files relating to Bathtub Jinn in Word, Action Outline, Excel, and OneNote; Scrivener stores everything, including research, pictures, note cards, an outline, and no doubt things I haven’t discovered yet in one file.  It’s a large, complex program, so I did what I normally do:  I bought books.  Two of them, in fact (although Scrivener does come with a very good tutorial and a pdf manual), Writing a Novel with Scrivener by David Hewson and Scrivener for Dummies by Gwen Hernandez.  I’m just getting started with Scrivener, but so far I’m very impressed.  You can try it before you buy it, and it only costs $40.  (What would I have given for a program like this when I was in grad school?   I couldn’t have imagined it.  When I was in grad school computers were programmed with punch cards, and I wrote all my papers with index cards and carbon paper on a portable electric Smith-Corona typewriter.)

Watching:  I’ve tried to get excited about Revolution, I really have.  I love the premise.  I’m a sucker for abandoned amusement parks and disintegrating freeways.  Rebuilding civilization–or sliding back into the dark ages–has always been a favorite theme.  But I find myself watching the show on DVR or On Demand, when I get around to it.  When it’s actually on, I’m watching Castle.  I think, once again, that it boils down to characters.  As much as I like the premise of the show, the characters haven’t grabbed me and refused to let go.  But this week’s episode is on again Saturday evening, and I’ll give it at least one more shot then.

This evening I’ve been watching/listening to a show I recently discovered on the Travel Channel: Mysteries at the Museum.  Very enjoyable for a history/artifact buff like me.  I’ve started watching the schedule and recording episodes.  One of these days I’m going to find the beginning of a good story on that show.

 

Farewell, Lily Bell

10 Oct 2012 2 Comments

by Kay Hudson in TV, Writing Tags: , ,

I’m still reeling from the finale (season? series?) of Hell on Wheels Sunday night.  If you haven’t seen it, and mean to, you may not want to read this.  There Will Be Spoilers.

The writers of Hell on Wheels have never pulled their punches, and they certainly didn’t start doing so in Blood Moon Rising, the last episode of the second season.  They burned the town to the ground, and they killed people.  Important people.

When Mr. Toole, Eva’s husband, trailed her to Elam’s cabin (where she was in fact telling Elam that she had decided once and for all to stay with Toole) and waved his gun around, I fully expected him to take a shot at Eva or Elam.  I didn’t expect him to blow his own head off, but that’s what he did.

When Cullen marched Gundersen out to the middle of the bridge to hang him, I expected Gundersen to make one last insane speech.  I didn’t expect him to jump off the bridge, robbing Cullen of his personal vengeance, but that’s what he did.

The real shock, though, was the murder of Lily Bell.  I watched in disbelief as the odious, mad Gundersen strangled her.  I held my breath, waiting for Cullen to burst through the door of the railroad car and save her.  But he didn’t.  My first reaction, after the disbelief, was that I’d never be able to watch the show again.  But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made.  I still don’t like it, but I understand.

As a viewer who always enjoys a good love story, I was crushed by Lily’s death.  She and Cullen were just discovering each other.  Did they have a chance at happiness together?  We’ll never know.

As a viewer of the female persuasion, I was angry.  We don’t have enough strong, competent, complex female characters on TV to throw one away lightly.

But as a writer, I gradually had to admit to myself that Lily’s death was a logical step in the story.  Hell on Wheels was never Lily’s story, or Eva’s, or Ruth’s, as much as the women fascinate me.  It’s a story of power, corruption and redemption, honor, treachery and vengeance, and its central focus is Cullen Bohannon.  It’s certainly not a romance, and Cullen is not a hero.

But he is the protagonist, and the story has followed his choices, many of which have been dreadful.  Is he seeking redemption, or running from it?  Hard to tell.  He’s badly flawed, deeply damaged, and he knows it.  He’s afraid, he tells Mr. Toole, that Lily won’t even like him once she really gets to know him.  In a romance novel, the love of a good woman would redeem a man like Cullen,  but not in a story like Hell on Wheels.  This is not a story about happy endings.

I don’t know if Hell on Wheels will be back next summer for a third season.  As I watched the end of Blood Moon Rising, I wasn’t even sure I wanted it to.  But after thinking about it for a couple of days, I’m hoping it returns.  I want to know what happens next to the Durants, Eva and Elam, Ruth and her church, Sean and Mickey and the rest.  I’m not entirely convinced that Gundersen is dead.  And I want to watch Cullen Bohannon drive the railroad west.

 

 

 

 

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