Watching the first season of Haven, which is a sort of small-town/X-Files crossbreed. Kirsti mentioned it, and I like talking TV shows and the like with her, and it’s certainly not the kind of thing I’d avoid. Spoilers after cut, and I should really figure out some kind of cut-off point for when to quit worrying about spoilers. First season only came out last year, but I watch older things too.
It’s reminding me an awful lot of Fringe; blonde FBI agent whose childhood ties her to the Underlying Great Whatsit ends up in a small and casual group. The guy she works with has a long exposure to the strangeness, but is unhappy with it and has trouble accepting it, even though he himself is a living example of the strangeness in a very unobvious way. The frequency of the strange occurrences is the kind of thing that makes you wonder why the hell people are not running away in droves. And there’s a sort of gleeful unabashedness to the weirdness; this is not a show which delves into the slowly building emotional shocks of dealing with Things You’ve Learnt Cannot Happen.
As you may gather from the above paragraph, this is not a great show. But it’s a consistent show, and a fun one; I may play Sudoku or knit fiddly things or type while I watch it, but I’m happy to have it on.
The Troubles are… I don’t know if I want to say well-designed, or just thematically consistent, or not condescending. They’re linked to the person and the situation that sets them off, almost-but-not-quite-as-strongly as the powers in Misfits, and the show does the same thing of not hitting you over the head with the (comfortably obvious) correlations. Some guy gets angry and all the food he’s partaken of gets contaminated by hydrochloric acid? This works, and they don’t actually hit you over the head with any jokes about bile. So that’s a plus.