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sub_dividedConvinced by this GIF set to watch Teen Wolf. The first eight episodes are really, really good and make you feel good about the state of cable television. The second season drops most of what was good about the first season in favor of being more generic. ;_; Still, at least I have the memories.
Let's start with the positives. Here’s what’s great about the first season:
1. When he doesn’t have that overly-intense, borderline-psycho look in his eyes, Scott (the Teen Wolf) is one of those dreamy and unfocused guys whose main charm is that he actually listens to women (sometimes even including his great single mom). Apart from actively pursuing the girl, he is a passive character who can generally be counted on to prioritize his love life over whatever very sensible and intelligent (or alternately crazy and dangerous) thing his best friend is currently pushing him to do. The gif maker didn’t like this version of Scott, but I loved it because it left more space for the girlfriend and best friend characters to really shine (and they are great). Also the fact that Scott's regular and full-moon selves are distinctly different allows the writers to explore "becoming a werewolf" as a metaphor for mania (e.g. starting about 25 minutes into this episode).
2. Stiles!!! Stiles is the best character. He’s like this hyperactive nerd, but with a huge attraction to danger and dangerous situations, and an ability to fill in Scott’s awkward silences with constant (entertaining) chatter. Although he's passionately nerdy about helping Scott figure out the werewolf thing and is generally a supportive friend, he also pursues his own goals, or in other words isn't just a sidekick. Actually I am kind of disappointed that "he and Derrick are boyfriends" from the GIF set didn’t turn out to be really true, since that would have given the character more screentime.**
3. Not as impressed by the way the show handles Alison - it almost feels like they make her physically strong (e.g. good with a bow, good at gymnastics) because it’s an easier way to signal "strength" than mental toughness - but she is a very sympathetic character, not just because of her bad family situation, but also because she is nice on top of being pretty and smart. Also, the chemistry between her and Scott is real, yo.
4. OTOH, the other main female character in Teen Wolf, Lydia, is mentally tough and a good contrast to Alison. The show was doing something really interesting with her and Jackson, the seemingly dominant guy (captain of the lacrosse team etc) who is actually deeply insecure. Actually they are sort of an insecure-narcissistic pair, pretty well suited to each other, until Jackson decides he'd rather use Alison to figure out Scott's secrets and Lydia never recovers from the breakup. Too bad they had to make her CRAZY in season 2 >_>.
5. The way the show is shot, the writing. Teen Wolf really does have the feel of an 80s teen movie, kind of de-saturated and slow(er)-paced. There are more shots of people staring intensely at each other and fewer abrupt scene changes. People talk less, but their individual lines are better and the show will often refer back to things that happened earlier in the episode in a wordless shot, trusting the audience to get it. It's not the same post-Buffy pacing we are used to, but it's very good.
6. The soundtrack, 'cause it's this funny combination of 80s music and 00s music that sounds like 80s music, as if we are in an alternate reality where the 90s never happened.
7. But the characters all have cell phones, use computers, use services like Find My Phone and Skype, etc etc. This show handles technology really well.
8. Horror-movie shots!. Actually this is still true in season 2 and might even be a bit better this season - not everything is downhill. The best shots are the ones where the characters are having vivid horrible nightmares that turn out to have actually happened. Approve.
Things I don’t like about season 2, compared to season 1 (SPOILERS):
1. Focus on plot over smoldering intense looks.
1b. ...Actually it’s not the plot I object to, it’s the particular kind of plotting, which is all about misdirection - making you think the bad guy might be this person when really it’s this person, etc. You can’t build up a bunch of false leads without dropping something somewhere, so the writing suffers. Also, the focus on plot twists ironically makes it more predictable, like a procedural, and takes the emphasis away from lycanthropy-as-metaphor-for-madness.
2. Since Scott has now "mastered" his wolf side and the bad alpha wolf is out of the picture, the new focus in season 2 is our-team-versus-your-team. This is fine, except they decided to make Scott the alpha-personality of his group, shifting the focus away from the canonically smarter Alison and Stiles, while the group is fighting against a wolf pack we are supposed to dislike because they are too hierarchical. Also, Scott and friends never tell anyone else the truth and always act on their own, but they are fighting against a wolf-hunter clan whose main issues are that they don’t follow a code and are too secretive. MIXED MESSAGES. (Actually no, the message is clearly "you should root for this guy because he is the main character").
3. Characters become more stereotypical in this season. Scott is the decision-maker and leader, and also develops into a kind of bland I-must-save-everyone hero; Stiles is the sidekick best friend who uses sarcasm to cover up for the fact that he is powerless; Alison becomes the put-upon girlfriend who has to give up most other things in her life to be with Scott; Lydia is still a genius but also a crazy person and her craziness makes her weak and isolates her; Jackson becomes even more of a jerk and also stops being the smart, perceptive guy who was able to figure out Scott's secret just by paying attention and digging around. (OK, so maybe Jackson hasn't changed much.)
***
TL;DR: Teen Wolf becomes yet another show about a supernaturally powered hero and his group of friends who must keep their crimefighting (and dating) a secret from their teachers and parents and friends. Less Teen Wolf and more Buffy, complete with evil principal. I like Buffy a lot, but Teen Wolf had a very different kind of excellence going on for a while there. No matter what, everyone should still watch the first eight episodes.
**Maybe it's just because I was looking for it (thanks to the GIF set), but it actually did seem for a while like the show was going to pair up Stiles and Derrick - they gave Stiles a bunch of lines about the show’s canonically gay character ("I don’t think he likes me - am I not attractive to gay guys?") and spent some time building up chemistry by getting them alone together and then cutting between shots of Derrick looking intense and scary and Stiles looking scared but not repulsed. I suppose making the best/only friend gay would have thrown the main character’s sexuality too much into question, though. (But how can you watch those scenes between him and Alison and not see how totally into her he is???) If I was a writer on this show, here's how I would handle it: Stiles confuses danger and attraction and falls for Derrick, who falls for Stiles’ talent for filling up silences with endless entertaining chatter. Stiles and Derrick attempt a relationship but it's too fraught, and ends badly. Stiles then experiences a crisis of sexual identity, concludes he must be gay, and goes to a club to try to pick up guys (because when he decides to do something, he does it 100%), but there’s no one there who attracts him and it doesn’t quite work. It seems that some kind of werewolf magic bewitched him, and he’s not actually gay. Later, though, he realizes that he is attracted to men - particularly the overly intense ones - on some level, even though he is like 70% straight. Because desire is complex and bisexuality exists, yo.
***Also in my mental version of Teen Wolf, Alison knows about her family from the beginning, and has an early hunch about Scott when she sees him play for the lacrosse team/when he hands her a pen on the first day of school. She brings the dog to the clinic and agrees to date him because she wants to see if it is true. However, Scott is so seemingly harmless and easy-going that she decides he can’t possibly be a werewolf, and also at some point realizes that she has fallen in love with him. She dismisses evidence that he's anything besides a regular teenager because she likes him so much, and her family focuses on Stiles as the second werewolf. When it turns out that Scott is the wolf, after all, she makes the tough choice to protect him from her family, since he's nothing like the things she was told about werewolves growing up. She starts to question the things her family has told her and eventually rebels against them.
...Yeah, that was never going to happen. (Sigh.)
Let's start with the positives. Here’s what’s great about the first season:
1. When he doesn’t have that overly-intense, borderline-psycho look in his eyes, Scott (the Teen Wolf) is one of those dreamy and unfocused guys whose main charm is that he actually listens to women (sometimes even including his great single mom). Apart from actively pursuing the girl, he is a passive character who can generally be counted on to prioritize his love life over whatever very sensible and intelligent (or alternately crazy and dangerous) thing his best friend is currently pushing him to do. The gif maker didn’t like this version of Scott, but I loved it because it left more space for the girlfriend and best friend characters to really shine (and they are great). Also the fact that Scott's regular and full-moon selves are distinctly different allows the writers to explore "becoming a werewolf" as a metaphor for mania (e.g. starting about 25 minutes into this episode).
2. Stiles!!! Stiles is the best character. He’s like this hyperactive nerd, but with a huge attraction to danger and dangerous situations, and an ability to fill in Scott’s awkward silences with constant (entertaining) chatter. Although he's passionately nerdy about helping Scott figure out the werewolf thing and is generally a supportive friend, he also pursues his own goals, or in other words isn't just a sidekick. Actually I am kind of disappointed that "he and Derrick are boyfriends" from the GIF set didn’t turn out to be really true, since that would have given the character more screentime.**
3. Not as impressed by the way the show handles Alison - it almost feels like they make her physically strong (e.g. good with a bow, good at gymnastics) because it’s an easier way to signal "strength" than mental toughness - but she is a very sympathetic character, not just because of her bad family situation, but also because she is nice on top of being pretty and smart. Also, the chemistry between her and Scott is real, yo.
4. OTOH, the other main female character in Teen Wolf, Lydia, is mentally tough and a good contrast to Alison. The show was doing something really interesting with her and Jackson, the seemingly dominant guy (captain of the lacrosse team etc) who is actually deeply insecure. Actually they are sort of an insecure-narcissistic pair, pretty well suited to each other, until Jackson decides he'd rather use Alison to figure out Scott's secrets and Lydia never recovers from the breakup. Too bad they had to make her CRAZY in season 2 >_>.
5. The way the show is shot, the writing. Teen Wolf really does have the feel of an 80s teen movie, kind of de-saturated and slow(er)-paced. There are more shots of people staring intensely at each other and fewer abrupt scene changes. People talk less, but their individual lines are better and the show will often refer back to things that happened earlier in the episode in a wordless shot, trusting the audience to get it. It's not the same post-Buffy pacing we are used to, but it's very good.
6. The soundtrack, 'cause it's this funny combination of 80s music and 00s music that sounds like 80s music, as if we are in an alternate reality where the 90s never happened.
7. But the characters all have cell phones, use computers, use services like Find My Phone and Skype, etc etc. This show handles technology really well.
8. Horror-movie shots!. Actually this is still true in season 2 and might even be a bit better this season - not everything is downhill. The best shots are the ones where the characters are having vivid horrible nightmares that turn out to have actually happened. Approve.
Things I don’t like about season 2, compared to season 1 (SPOILERS):
1. Focus on plot over smoldering intense looks.
1b. ...Actually it’s not the plot I object to, it’s the particular kind of plotting, which is all about misdirection - making you think the bad guy might be this person when really it’s this person, etc. You can’t build up a bunch of false leads without dropping something somewhere, so the writing suffers. Also, the focus on plot twists ironically makes it more predictable, like a procedural, and takes the emphasis away from lycanthropy-as-metaphor-for-madness.
2. Since Scott has now "mastered" his wolf side and the bad alpha wolf is out of the picture, the new focus in season 2 is our-team-versus-your-team. This is fine, except they decided to make Scott the alpha-personality of his group, shifting the focus away from the canonically smarter Alison and Stiles, while the group is fighting against a wolf pack we are supposed to dislike because they are too hierarchical. Also, Scott and friends never tell anyone else the truth and always act on their own, but they are fighting against a wolf-hunter clan whose main issues are that they don’t follow a code and are too secretive. MIXED MESSAGES. (Actually no, the message is clearly "you should root for this guy because he is the main character").
3. Characters become more stereotypical in this season. Scott is the decision-maker and leader, and also develops into a kind of bland I-must-save-everyone hero; Stiles is the sidekick best friend who uses sarcasm to cover up for the fact that he is powerless; Alison becomes the put-upon girlfriend who has to give up most other things in her life to be with Scott; Lydia is still a genius but also a crazy person and her craziness makes her weak and isolates her; Jackson becomes even more of a jerk and also stops being the smart, perceptive guy who was able to figure out Scott's secret just by paying attention and digging around. (OK, so maybe Jackson hasn't changed much.)
***
TL;DR: Teen Wolf becomes yet another show about a supernaturally powered hero and his group of friends who must keep their crimefighting (and dating) a secret from their teachers and parents and friends. Less Teen Wolf and more Buffy, complete with evil principal. I like Buffy a lot, but Teen Wolf had a very different kind of excellence going on for a while there. No matter what, everyone should still watch the first eight episodes.
**Maybe it's just because I was looking for it (thanks to the GIF set), but it actually did seem for a while like the show was going to pair up Stiles and Derrick - they gave Stiles a bunch of lines about the show’s canonically gay character ("I don’t think he likes me - am I not attractive to gay guys?") and spent some time building up chemistry by getting them alone together and then cutting between shots of Derrick looking intense and scary and Stiles looking scared but not repulsed. I suppose making the best/only friend gay would have thrown the main character’s sexuality too much into question, though. (But how can you watch those scenes between him and Alison and not see how totally into her he is???) If I was a writer on this show, here's how I would handle it: Stiles confuses danger and attraction and falls for Derrick, who falls for Stiles’ talent for filling up silences with endless entertaining chatter. Stiles and Derrick attempt a relationship but it's too fraught, and ends badly. Stiles then experiences a crisis of sexual identity, concludes he must be gay, and goes to a club to try to pick up guys (because when he decides to do something, he does it 100%), but there’s no one there who attracts him and it doesn’t quite work. It seems that some kind of werewolf magic bewitched him, and he’s not actually gay. Later, though, he realizes that he is attracted to men - particularly the overly intense ones - on some level, even though he is like 70% straight. Because desire is complex and bisexuality exists, yo.
***Also in my mental version of Teen Wolf, Alison knows about her family from the beginning, and has an early hunch about Scott when she sees him play for the lacrosse team/when he hands her a pen on the first day of school. She brings the dog to the clinic and agrees to date him because she wants to see if it is true. However, Scott is so seemingly harmless and easy-going that she decides he can’t possibly be a werewolf, and also at some point realizes that she has fallen in love with him. She dismisses evidence that he's anything besides a regular teenager because she likes him so much, and her family focuses on Stiles as the second werewolf. When it turns out that Scott is the wolf, after all, she makes the tough choice to protect him from her family, since he's nothing like the things she was told about werewolves growing up. She starts to question the things her family has told her and eventually rebels against them.
...Yeah, that was never going to happen. (Sigh.)
(no subject)
Date: 2012-07-13 07:39 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-07-23 12:29 pm (UTC)Absurdly long and absurdly late
Date: 2012-07-22 11:29 pm (UTC)Also, I hated that S1 prolonged Scott's secret-keeping from Allison until the end, because as cute as they were, I kept choking on the idealization of a romance in which one party was deliberately hiding a significant piece of identity from the other. In general I got fed up with important information being withheld from Allison by everyone who purported to care about her, all the time. (And the one person who gives her information willingly--who acknowledges and legitimizes her desire to learn and grow and become stronger--is evil! lol so much for female mentorship). In S2 she has more info, and as such is able to exercise more agency and be part of the team--tbh I enjoy the increased Scooby Gang factor that resulted from her inclusion, because her position in S1 was driving me bonkers. Will be interested to see how things shake out with her family in the rest of S2.
I'm with you when it comes to Scott's character dev, though, since his doofy S1 self is way, way more appealing than S2's "I must protect everyone!!" cookie-cutter shounen manga hero. Would really appreciate it if the show would do something to undercut his S2 protective/patronizing machismo.
Also agreed that the horror moments are good and only keep getting better.
What I resent most about S2 is the centrality of Jackson, because I can't stand his chiseled face, and a vulnerable, nuanced jerk is still a jerk. XD Would rather see pretty much any other character get the screen time and attention he's been getting.
Also, the usual feminist gripes: 1.) why can't this show pass Bechdel more often and 2.) powerful adult women are evil AGAIN.
a wolf pack we are supposed to dislike because they are too hierarchical.
I actually thought the show was doing something interesting with Derek's ethically questionable pack-making--suggesting how thin/blurry the line is between empowering the disempowered and taking advantage of them. On the one hand, his come-on to Erica was beyond creepy (and struck me as OOC), but I couldn't really argue with his choice to give an abused kid the means to escape his abuser. It saddened me that both Erica and Isaac became leather-clad caricatures of flunkyhood in short order. But I guess I'm interested in the ideological divide between Derek and Scott, and I don't see the show painting Derek as being all wrong. Scott's position is that he doesn't want to be a werewolf, therefore nobody should want to be a werewolf and the choice shouldn't be offered, period (never mind the question of whether vulnerable minors are capable of giving informed consent lol), but I don't really sympathize with his dictatorialism on that front.
Anyway, now I'm stuck waiting for more episodes like everybody else. :P
Re: Absurdly long and absurdly late
Date: 2012-07-23 12:59 pm (UTC)Toooooootally agreed about the secret-keeping from Alison, though! When the other characters did that, it undermined everything the show told us about her being a "strong" character. She's not strong if she's not in control of her own destiny... besides making the female mentor evil, Teen Wolf also made the one person who is sympathetic to her frustration with Scott hiding things from her, and who actually talks to her about what's going on and tries to figure things out, actually a jerk who's just using her (Jackson). It was kind of striking how even though she'd never told Scott about her family keeping secrets from her (he never asked), she told Jackson right away. Because that's how it usually works when there's something bothering you and someone actually seems to be leveling with you.
You know, I was just thinking that S2 Scott was boring and nonsensical, but now I can see patronizing too. BOO.
Jackson screentime would be okay if they'd used it to flesh out the character a bit, but his only motivation for being such an overachiever jerk is still "he's adopted". I thought maybe they were gonna do something with the revelation that his parents were killed by werewolves - maybe he has repressed trauma? - but no, it happened when he was a baby. It's all kind of baffling, almost like the scriptwriters decided to make him a lizard because that's what his face looks like.
The thing I dislike the most about season 2, though, is what happened to Lydia. Why go through all the trouble of setting her up as sekritly smart and drop hints that she is a "natural leader", and then make her, not just scarred by everything that's going on, but actually having psychotic delusional episodes? And no one tells Lydia anything, either (and once again the one guy who is sympathetic to her turns out to be after something - well, I assume, given the way the romance is being set up and his crazy eyes). I actually thought she was gonna show up at the 11th hour of S1 and become the next Alpha, haha. (That would have been a lot more interesting than Dereck becoming the alpha.)
And then there's Alison's mom, who is this scary ball-breaker. I didn't want to talk about it too much, because I was listing positives, but honestly as much as this show is good with gay issues, it's not very good with women.
I actually thought the show was doing something interesting with Derek's ethically questionable pack-making--suggesting how thin/blurry the line is between empowering the disempowered and taking advantage of them.
You know, I hadn't thought of that, but now that you mention it, it is kind of interesting. You can't really argue that their lives aren't better now than they were before. On the other hand, having Scott be the spokesperson for full disclosure and not keeping secrets is really ironic. :p Dereck was always upfront with Scott, he never tried to hide anything about his past or his intentions.
Erica and Isaac's flunky-hood is balanced out by the big black guy who wants to be more of an equal, I guess? Also whether or not the characters are good, the actors do seem to enjoy playing these kind of swaggering, sexual characters. But they do becomes less interesting character, because of that.
I think what it mainly is, is that writing was tight enough for the first couple episodes that I figured anything that was hanging, like Alison's ignorance or Lydia's home life, would eventually be resolved in a satisfying and sensitive way. Now that the writing is focused on misdirection and what people's faces look like, I just don't believe that anymore, so I'm more inclined to judge what's actually on the screen harshly. Maybe that's unfair, because maybe the writers never really intended to address the issues I thought they were going to address. But also maybe some network exec came along and told them to be less subtle.
Re: Absurdly long and absurdly late
Date: 2012-07-28 02:33 am (UTC)As for Lydia, I think her arc still has potential. I mean, she's not actually crazy, right--she was being haunted by the undead spirit of wossface the Alpha. /eyeroll Leaving aside the plot absurdity, I've actually been impressed with her mental resilience, her ability to recover from trauma. While it's annoying that she's been made into the semi-unwitting vehicle of wossface's return, there could still be satisfaction and triumph if she's also the one to finally, truly end him. If she doesn't get to do that--if it's Scott instead, ugh--then I'll throw up my hands. The moment where she gets to knock Derek out by blowing purple pixie dust in his face is pretty great, though.
Yeah, the writers are just not that good with female characters. It comes through in the portrayal of parent-child dynamics: the show does really well with father-son (some of Stiles' scenes with his dad are the most moving bits in the series imo!), not too bad with mother-son, not so good with father-daughter...and mother-daughter pretty much ain't even a thing.