August 01, 2000
Bad TV and Good Reviews
Bad TV! Oh yes, last night was the night of bad TV. What did I watch? Well, as I confessed a few days ago, I recently bought a full run of "Kindred: The Embrace" from eBay. Friends and neighbors, I'm here to tell you: there's a reason that show only lasted two months. It was, however, almost entertainingly bad. Last night I watched the first tape, which consisted of the first two-hour long episode, and the first one-hour episode. (Which ended up taking about two hours. One-third of the length was commercials originally. That's scary.)
I told several folks online last night that was very much like watching someone's LARP. An extremely well-costumed, delightfully designed LARP where everyone actually looked like their character, but a LARP nonetheless. Some of the dialogue just made me giggle, thinking that it sounded a lot like the improvised dialogue I'd heard from various players in times past. The sad part was, it wasn't improvised. The hour-long episode was better than the pilot, and started to hint at the vampire politics that are supposed to be the focus of the game. That part was actually quite cool. In poking through the web (IMDB to be precise), I found out that the actor playing the Prince (who was probably the highlight of what I saw, at least) died in '96.
In short, there was a lot of potential that didn't quite get realized, and the scenery was well-chewed. Might be fun to watch with a group of folks familiar with Vampire.
In other news... All I have to say is that Tribe 8's editor works damn fast. Last night as I was getting ready to leave work, I got my returned first draft via email, complete with comments and suggested changes.
I'm flabbergasted. She was "very pleased". The changes she wanted made are so few that it will take me about an hour to make them. With the exception of one supporting character's name, all of the changes involved just the wording of this phrase or that one, or changes that needed to be made to the manuscript format itself. Needless to say my writing confidence is way high. And I'm still turning that novel idea over and over in my head.
Posted by Lisa at August 1, 2000 12:48 PM
