“Meadowlands” — Series Premiere
Just because it’s British doesn’t mean it’s good.
Now that The Sopranos is off the air, dominance in the premium cable business is completely up for grabs. Because of this it seems highly suspect that neither HBO or Showtime had an established hit ready in the queue. Sure, Dexter wrapped its first season only six months ago, but having the second season ready once Tony Soprano took seven seconds of black to the back of the head would have certainly given the network that brought us The Red Shoe Diaries an edge in the competition. Instead, both HBO and Showtime have launched Sunday night dramas that couldn’t be more inaccessible to your casual television fan with pay-cable. One is about a family of surfers who speak in Shakespearian beach lingo and are followed around by Jesus. The other deals with a family hiding out in a suburban distopia where Starbucks and SUVs have been replaced with a pervasive sense of weirdness and the now ubiquitous “hidden pasts”. More after the jump…
There is certainly a charm in being an oddity. As big as the medium of narrative television has become in recent years (thanks digital tier!) one still gets the feeling we’re only seeing a half dozen or so original stories. Everything else is just a retread of something we’ve already seen — occasionally those retreads prove to be better than the original, which is always a pleasant surprise.
The problem with Meadowlands is that it tries so hard to be the strangest show you’ve ever seen its very original and very interesting premise (a town inhabited entirely by people in witness protection) gets completely overshadowed by the nonsensical details.
The series is joint production between Showtime and London’s Channel 4 and is presented in that washed-out video look common to anyone familiar with programming on BBC America. I don’t know if its the overcast weather or the transfer from PAL video to NTSC (haha, video nerd reference!) but it looks likes its being shot through a panty and/or a time-machine.
In the pilot we meet that the Brogans, a typical British family (save for their mute, MILF/voyeur-obsessed son, sexually aggressive daughter and a dad who might have killed some people) that has just relocated to Meadowlands, a quaint little suburb on a hill with no crime and matching color schemes, as part of some sort of curious witness protection program. While adjusting to their new names the family meets some of the locals, like Jack the area handyman who seems to enjoy the company of underage girls and Brenda the neighbor woman who can’t stop gushing about her beautiful daughter Jezebel (who makes a thunderous entrance at the end of this first episode) and who seems to enjoy the notion of gothish teenagers watching her while she undresses.
So yeah, it’s that kind of show.
All of this fine, if at any time during the episodes run we got the sense that the creators were looking to tell a story that was about something more than odd quirks, but at this stage in the game they seem to be interested in little else.
Still, it isn’t everyday a project this curious makes it all the way to our livingrooms and so I hate to bail on the show after only one episode — but I can’t exactly recommend it either. If the show ever turns into something more than a series randomly collected ideas, I’ll be the first to let you know.
Meadowlands airs on Showtime Sunday nights at 10:00pm (and then sporadically throughout the week).
