While the dudes are out, the ladies are apparently home watching this supernatural crime drama about a 90-year-old vampire—a minor in vamp years—Mick St. John (Alex O’Loughlin), who works as a private eye in Los Angeles, using his ability to smell blood, jump tall buildings and, well, look cool in a leather jacket in Los Angeles to solve crimes. Now, before you say, “That’s a total rip-off of Angel and Forever Knight! I would never expect such blatant cloning from a network with 16 variations of CSI!” here’s a sampling of the comments (original spelling and punctuation intact):
“I’m writing as a viewer who watches no other show on Friday night except for Moonlight! Yes I turn my TV on just to watch it, and I have the thought that you will be hearing from alot of other Moonlight fans. I’m sorry that you obviously don’t ‘get’ the show, but alot of us do. You are missing out on a great hour of entertainment. Your loss!”
And: “As the previous poster observed you obviously don’t understand the motive of the show. Unlike many other supernatural series, Moonlight does not take itself too seriously, which is the entire point. The producers are striving for campy fun entertainment TV. Before you review something so harshly maybe take a step back and attempt to realize what the producers and writers are trying to achieve and the nature of your hypercritical measuring stick may evolve.”
Also: “I am a viewer of Moonlight. I choose to watch it because its a wonderful show. Nobody is forced to watch anything, so if you don’t like a show just don’t watch it. It’s your major loss.”
These women—yes, they were all women … I think—were obviously concerned about my entertainment enrichment and my hypercritical measuring stick (as the ladies usually are). So what if they didn’t “get” that I was claiming Moonlight as an official guilty pleasure of The Only TV Column That Matters™? That I was actually singing the praises of the series’ “sub-cable depths of hilarious doomed-romance cheese”? Honestly, how could anyone mistake that for a negative review?
I’m all about Moonlight’s convenient twists on vampire lore (Mick’s merely annoyed by sunlight, garlic and wooden stakes—as are most Los Angelinos), stylized look (how are the streets always sexy ‘n’ shiny when it never rains?), valiant attempts at humor (“He’s tall, dark … and immortal!”), Mick’s Raymond-Chandler-on-Thorazine inner dialogue (“When you live forever, the past always catches up with you,” deep), his utter lack of chemistry with mortal “love” Beth (Sophia Myles, kind of a Kate Winslet blowup doll), the fact that she’s an “up-and-coming” “Internet TV journalist” who breaks hot stories on a “news” Website that apparently has higher traffic than Google or Craigslist (and yet she’s filed maybe three reports over Moonlight’s 12 episodes—TMZ would be aghast). Just ask my TiVo. It always asks me, “Are you sure you want to record this? Really?”
Hells yeah—I can’t look away! Did I mention co-star Jason Dohring as a 400-year-old vamp version of the same rich-brat character he played on Veronica Mars? Or Shannyn Sossamon as the vampire “seductress” who turned Mick into a vampire six decades ago, despite having even less (!) of a personality than Beth? Or that Moonlight won a People’s Choice Award last week? Perhaps I just went too far …
