I
enjoy a brutally scathing review as well as the next guy, even when undeserved – Dorothy Parker’s elegantly
snide ‘Tonstant
Weader Fwows Up’ comes to mind, directed at Winnie-the-Pooh, no less - but I’ve
always avoided dishing it out. This
could simply be good manners, or fear of retribution, or the courtesy of least
said, soonest mended, but I’d
rather encourage my enthusiasms.
On the other hand. I watched a limited series that ran under the
Hallmark banner, the Martha’s Vineyard
mysteries. Four
hour-and-a-half episodes, so TV movies, essentially. I’d like to say I can’t quite put my finger
on what doesn’t work, but that would be too charitable. I can tell you exactly where it goes wrong;
it takes lazy tropes, and hits you over the head with them, again and again.
Let’s
look at the basics. You need an engaging
cast. The secret of Rockford,
or Magnum, for that matter, is that
you can spend time with Jim Garner or Tom Selleck, and their amiability is half
the battle won. But there’s obviously
more: you take an amiable ensemble, and you have some kind of relatable
gimmick, to create character conflict, and you get a show like The Coroner, or Death in Paradise, or Brokenwood. Are they all that original? Not really.
It’s the familiarity we keep coming back for. They’re series. The two main characters in the Martha’s Vineyard mysteries are played by Jesse Metcalfe
and Sarah Lind, both of them charming and attractive. The guy who plays her dad, the island’s chief
of police, is Eric Keenleyside, even better.
So far, so good.
The
set-up. He’s a former Boston cop, wounded in the line of duty, out
on disability. She’s a local girl, went
to medical school off-island, now she’s back.
They of course have a history, a summer romance back when. Her dad, the aforementioned chief of police, needs
their help to investigate the sudden rash of murders occasioned by the
scripts. Oh, and the ex-cop has
psychological baggage, his partner killed in the same ambush that made him
redundant.
The
thing is, you can forgive a certain amount of contrivance. It’s not the end of the world. The problem here is that it’s all contrived. They’ve checked every single box. (I left out Bob the barista, who serves
coffee and Zen.) Jesse and Sarah’s charm
just isn’t enough.
And
the writing – I’m sorry – is dreadful.
They’ve taken a paint-by-numbers concept, and the scripts follow suit.
One
last aggravation. It’s not location
shot, not even establishing footage; they filmed in British Columbia. It’s as close to Martha’s Vineyard as Jessica
Fletcher’s Cabot Cove is to Ogunquit,
Maine. I know, there are economies of scale. Good
Will Hunting was shot in Toronto. Tom
Selleck’s series of Jesse Stone movies was shot in Halifax.
Fair enough. Canada’s great
for making movies. But in this case,
they’re not even paying lip service. There’s
a scene where the chief and the cop are fishing for bluefish. Off a beach, in the harbor, in protected water.
You go after blues with a surf-casting rig, on an open shore, where the
bottom shelves off, because blues run in deeper water, and chase smaller baitfish
into the shallows. They’re ferocious predators,
fierce on fishing tackle. I realize I’m
being a real pissy-pants about all this, but it just sticks in my craw.
Certain
things are tried and true, and if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, but there’s a real
difference between staying in the audience comfort zone and desperate laziness.
