Come As You Aren't

Since I've been so full of criticism where The Secret Circle is concerned, I thought it was only fair to balance the scales by saying something nice about the show today. Here goes: I like the way this show kills people.  Yep, I found the deaths of the never-before-seen witch and magic shop owner and Luke both appropriately grotesque and entertaining. 

I think Jake's arrival and subterfuge add a much more interesting element to the show that it desperately needed but I'm still tired of waiting for the deets on what happened 16 years ago.  It's doled out one vague reference at a time and since that seems to be oodles more interesting than most of the kids, it's just about the only reason I'm still watching the show. 

I really don't know how much more of Phoebe Tonkin's labored American accent I can take.  It feels like she has to chew on every word to get it out and when she finally does it's still tinged with Australia around every edge. On the other hand, her interactions with Jake last night were the most interesting thing she's had to do since the show began. 

Finally, filed under the heading "irony is a bitch," I saw evidence of a connection between Adam and Diana for the first time and it naturally came after they'd broken up.  Sigh.

O Brother

I never read the books that The Secret Circle is based on and so I have no pre-conceived notions about what should happen or how characters should behave.  I am going into this show with only the expectation of being entertained and on paper, that seems like it should be a slam dunk.  Do I like TV shows about teenagers?  Yes I do (see: Dawson's Creek, Everwood, One Tree Hill, Roswell, Veronica Mars, My So-Called Life, The O.C. and dozens upon dozens of others).  Do I like shows about supernatural stuff?  Yes I do (see: Supernatural, The Vampire Diaries, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Angel, Charmed, etc.).  I am predisposed to like this show without much effort on its part.  And yet....

The quality of the storytelling and the acting is all over the place and I'm not sure what to think about any of it.  A few of my friends are really enjoying it and I want to like it so that I can talk to them about it, but more often than not I'm barely able to care what's happening with the story because I'm too busy being overwhelmed with feelings of ambivalence.  Frankly, I've seen little evidence that the writers care much more than I do about these people.  The vast majority of the characters lack dimension, depth, humanity, interest and even the most basic likability. 

I cut the show some slack when the characters all seemed generic and cardboard in the pilot because I thought there was potential for things to develop into something more intriguing as we got to know them more.  It seemed impossible for Melissa and Nick not to get more interesting since both were barely more than extras in the pilot, but five episodes in Nick died and pretty much the only character development he ever got was a scene an episode later when Diana told us a story about when Charles took them sailing as kids.  Waiting until a character is dead to tell me anything interesting about him is not the way to win me over.  Melissa spent episode six sitting in a booth, staring into the middle distance, having "emotions" over the death of her boyfriend.  "Emotions" we were only made aware of when she told Faye she was having them. 

Faye simpers and mean-girls her way through each episode as if simply being pretty and making vaguely menacing eyes and/or comments is the same as being interesting.  It isn't.  Cassie's primary personality trait appears to be "staring agape" and she's working that for all it's worth.  Apparently the boys in town find that (as well as her low-cut tops and miniskirts) far more appealing than do I because she's the Joey Potter of TSC (that is: universally beloved by members of the opposite sex for no fathomable reason other than because the writers say it's so).  Adam's received the lion's share of the character development having been allowed to get angry, be concerned, and make sex eyes at two different girls. 

I saw such potential in Diana when I thought that her boyfriend's OBVIOUS attraction to the new girl would lead this over-nice alpha witch to become a closet vindictive bitch but sadly, she remains sweet to the point of blandness. 

With Nick dead and a hole in the circle that the entire show is named after, the writers brought in his older brother Jake, played by Chris Zylka, who is either a MUCH better actor than most everyone else, or the writers just managed to give him more qualities in one episode than everyone else put together.  Either way, he's the most interesting thing that's happened to the show so far, by a country mile. Is he on the side of good?  Bad?  Neither? Both? Will they let him into the circle? Will he double cross them? Will he kill them all? Will Grandma Jane crush him like a bug (you know she could)? These are questions his character prompts me to ponder.  The other characters usually just prompt be to wonder if I remembered to water the lawn and what I'll make for dinner tomorrow. 

I really think the show could be better than this.  The people could be more interesting and the plot could be less boring and I could care more about all of it.  So who needs to do what in order to fix it?  I have no insight into what happens in the writers' room or on the set so the best advice I can give them all is simply this: make it better. Make it a lot better.

Not Like When I Was A Teenager

I'll grant you that I haven't been a teenager for a very long time and even when I was, I had no super powers so the comparison might be the tiniest bit askew but still, I didn't know anyone in high school who was having as much sex as the kids on The Secret Circle seem to be having.  In fact, at 35, I know few adults having as much sex as the kids on The Secret Circle. 

Last week I saw a marked improvement in the interestingness of the plot but this week I felt a bit of a back slide.  Louis Hunter was the weakest acting link in the show and his character, Nick, was the least interesting to me by a lot so it didn't surprise me that they killed Nick off of the show.  It didn't even bother me since I didn't feel he was adding much to the story anyway.  But, if I'm being honest, it felt cheap.  It felt like they were copying The Vampire Diaries and I didn't enjoy it at all. 

There were some good things happening last night.  Jessica Parker Kennedy was great in the episode and I was glad that Grandma Jane finally had something to do.  Gale Harold was terrific and it seemed to be a real growth moment for the Charles character, indicating he may not be as one-note-menacing as he seemed in the pilot while Natasha Henstridge continues to be an enigma in the best way (is she good or evil? I really can't tell).  But on the whole the episode didn't hold together. 

The stuff between Adam and Diana felt out of place.  It's clear the writers are trying to build up the Adam/Diana relationship so that it seems less tepid in comparison to the wicked-hot chemistry he's got with Cassie but was this really the episode for that?  The tone was so off from the rest of the action in the ep that it was like watching an entirely different show.  And it came out of freaking nowhere to boot. 

The exposition about how you deal with demons should have worked because it makes sense for Grandma Jane to school these newbie witches on shit like this but the way they all just stood around agog while she laid the knowledge down came off as clumsy and uninteresting. 

Right now the entire show feels like the 8th grader trying desperately to be as cool as her high school senior sister...and failing. This is the Danielle Chase of shows.

Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?

I've been lukewarm on The Secret Circle thus far because I didn't find the story terribly compelling and, frankly, the uneven acting was difficult to overlook when the plot wasn't grabbing me.  But last night, things got quite a bit more interesting. 

Turns out that whatever happened the day of the fire that killed 1/2 of the Circle's parents, also resulted in "evil" itself crawling up inside of non-witch Heather (Camille Sullivan).  So Cassie's mom whipped up a Tupperware spell to seal evil inside Heather.  But all these years later, Cassie's curiosity has gotten the better of her so she and Faye do a spell that breaks the seal and lets the freshness out. 

So a newly crazy Heather tracks them down at Cassie's house where she beats them up and trashes the house and tells Cassie about the evil crawling inside of her and now she's possessed by a demon and blah blah.  The smackdown brings all the witches and Heather's brother Ben Cotton to the yard where they all watch her get hit by a car and killed.  Sad faces.  What they don't all see is the tiny black garter snake of evil that crawls out of her, down the street and up into the pocket of Nick's leather jacket.  Uh oh!

Other things that happened: Diana went to therapy where they apparently did not work on her lack of self esteem because she continues to willfully ignore the fact that her boyfriend kisses her like I kiss my grandma while cranking the sex eyes up to 11 when they're pointed at Cassie.  Not only does she not seem to have an issue with the insane sexual tension between her boyfriend and the new girl, but she keeps INSISTING that Adam help Cassie do things that require the two of them to be alone together.  And this week is no exception with the sex eyes, the close sitting, the sexual tension, the lingering touches and more sex eyes. 

Faye tries to convince Melissa to not waste her time with Nick and then Nick starts to act like he actually wants to have a regular relationship with Melissa which drives a bit of a wedge between Faye and Melissa until Nick saves Faye's bacon at Cassie's house and then Melissa and Nick head back to his house to have the sex and spend the night together because apparently their guardians learned all they know about parenting from TVD's Aunt Jenna. 

Oh yeah, and then the tiny black garter snake of evil demony badness crawled out of Nick's jacket pocket, onto the bed, up his arm, over his pillow and right into Melissa's ear.  I'll meet you at the drug store in the ear plug aisle.