Moonlight created by Ron Koslow and Trevor Munson. Review by Tom McMeekin
The plot behind Moonlight is older than some of
the ancient vampires in the show, but it still manages
to be bloody good entertainment.
Vampire detective flirts with human girl: it's been
done before, in fact, change the names and you could
probably pass off the scripts as vintage Angel
(the Buffy the Vampire Slayer spin-off). Not
Angel in its later seasons, mind you: the
further that show went the further it strayed from the
original cops & vamps premise to deal more with hell
dimensions and the spawn of gods and devils.
Moonlight is like returning to the roots of
Angel. It's a film noir procedural with a bite.
Private eye Mick St. John rescued a young girl from
becoming a vamp baby for him and his ex-wife—only to
have the girl, Beth Turner, show up on his cases years
later when she's a reporter for a TMZ/National
Enqurier-clone Web site.
The cast is the show's strongest element, all of whom
can make fan-boys and -girls tingle. Alex O'Loughlin
is a relative newcomer as Mick, but he quickly proves
his mettle. Sophia Myles (Beth) is known for dating
current Dr. Who David Tennant, and she has had tasty
roles in Who as well as Art School
Confidential, both Underworld films and as
the title character in Tristan + Isolde.
Shannyn Sossamon (Mick's ex-wife Coraline) is best
known for A Knight's Tale, 40 Days and 40
Nights, and for playing a schizophrenic's
hallucination of a dead girl in Dirt. Kevin
Weissman is instantly recognizable as Marshall from
Alias and continues to play the geeky
tech-saavy character here. Unfortunately, Weissman's
character has not appeared in quite some time.
Perhaps most exciting to
some, fresh off the cancellation of Veronica
Mars is Jason Dohring. There he played bad boy
Logan; here he's somewhat-friendly vampire playboy
Josef.
While discarding the original pilot and re-casting
almost an entire cast is often a sign of a faulty
premise, I think here it worked wonderfully here and
capitalized on the timing by picking up some actors
who wouldn't have been available otherwise. Not since
Firefly has such a cohesively strong and sexy
cast been assembled.
Mostly Moonlight follows a murder-of-the-week
format, with a different vampire going out of control
and being reined in by Mick and company. One of the
ongoing storylines is the budding romance of
star-crossed couple 'MickBeth,' which is progressing
at a nice pace (despite some questionable detours).
The other main story is the apparent resurrection of
Coraline, which brings with it the show's best twists.
The show uses occasional flashbacks to Mick and
Coraline's past, with the typical color-corrected
cinematography for such scenes. The vampire-face
makeup and vampire lore is perhaps more steampunk than
mystical. It treats vampirism as a medical condition
rather than possession by a demon. Mick and Josef work
more along the principle that keeping vampires out of
the way of humans is beneficial for their species, and
other vamps succumb to the same greed and physical
needs that drive humans to evil, rather than because
they lack souls. However, replacing coffins with
freezers and the like isn't that bold. It even uses
Evanescence songs in the first episode's soundtrack—an
annoyingly cliché move.
However, it's not that difficult to look past the
show's occasional faults and find something to enjoy.
The reason the plot has been recycled so often is its
appeal, and any one of the cast members makes it worth
tuning in.
If you liked the "Buffyverse," you'll like this for
its similarities, and if you didn't, you may find
appeal in its tonal differences. Since I often pined
over the loss of certain storylines in Angel I
was especially happy to see Moonlight, even
though it does take more than a page from his book.
Moonlight returns with four new episodes
beginning Friday, April 25, at 9 p.m. on CBS, bringing
the total number of episodes in the first season to
16.
Tom McMeekin is a writer and artist from Pennsylvania and a recent
graduate of Clarion University. His Web site is TomMcMeekin.com. For more from Tom, check out his ARWZ Blog
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