GDT's The Strain TV series

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From Hero Complex July 01, 2009:

[quote="Geoff Boucher"]
“The Strainâ€

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The vampire drama, starring Corey Stoll, gets an expected 13-episode order at the cable network.

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Collider:

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Tonight!

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Loved it. It's Hammer Horror in modern dress, half expected Peter Cushing to pop up.

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Recent trailer for the next season had me thinking about the series so far.

This show is very frustrating, because there are really great parts at war with parts that are totally lame. Part of this is GDT's decision to marry his style with something like a realistic procedural, using real-life agencies and technology and sociopolitical... err, stuff. This doesn't work well. The fantastical world of monstrous vampires spreading throughout the city while fought off by a desperate few is great. It's fun. It's thrilling. Then the show attempts to place this fantasy in a real world setting with real world ramifications and in that respect the show is laughably inept, full of events and character behavior that is downright puzzling.

This is best summarized by the main characters, who work for the CDC and are the first to observe the vampires. They're fairly good audience identification characters at the beginning, but soon we have an aged (Van Helsing-like) vampire hunter, a quirky Ukrainian exterminator, a positively Satanic Nazi vampire, and a gang member with a heart of gold (well, maybe not 'gold,' but he's an okay guy). Good fun, right? And all the while those dang CDC characters keep hogging the screentime with their complaining, doubting, and uninteresting personal stories relating to their home lives. They exhaust the patience of the audience!

Then there are some severe pacing problems. It feels like there just wasn't sufficient material from the novel to make a 13 episode series. An exciting episode that moves the story along will be followed by an episode where almost nothing happens. Usually this "nothing" consists of a lot of moping on the part of team CDC.

The monsters are very cool. The visuals, the behavior, and most of all: the sound effects! The sound effects really give the impression that the vampires have a biology completely alien to our own, more evocative of insects and reptiles. This show does painfully illustrate the importance of knowing how to shoot a creature prop: the vampire leader is a giant Nosferatu thing that is alternately really cool or really stupid looking depending on what episode you're watching.

[Tom R VanSlambrouck]

So I just started this show recently and can't believe I've waited this long to watch it. It's really good. I just finished off Season 1 and will probably start Season 2 tomorrow and hopefully finish it by Wednesday when I have to go back to work.