Now, no one is more open to a vampire tale than me. I'm a huge fan of Buffy. I watched the spin-off, Angel, with the same enthusiasm, although not the same obsession. And despite dreadful performances from Winona Ryder and Keanu Reeves, I'd watch Coppola's Dracula every day, just to hear Gary Oldman utter "I've crossed ooooceans of time to find you".
Moonlight is about a vampire. A good one. Battling crime and other evil vampires. Okay I'm sold.
The undead in question is played by Alex O'Loughlin who did a brief but not-too-shabby turn in the last season of The Shield, which by the way if you are not watching, shame on you. He's not classically good looking but in The Shield he had a certain appeal. Still, if I was going to cast a sexy member of the undead, he'd be nowhere near my wish-list.
Aesthetics aside, I can honestly say, hand on heart, that Moonlight is the worst pilot that I have ever seen. If you took a group of 12 year old children, asked them to write a script, threw it away and then asked monkeys to salvage it, it wouldn't differ from this appalling offering. Are we living in the 70's? Have we learned nothing about this genre? When we have characters declaring their love telepathically in the style of a Mike Hammer voice-over, it is time to laugh with embarrassment and switch off. The script, the casting, the plot, all are beyond redemption. It is truly, truly awful. Which is why it pains me to say that I will watch it again. Why? For starters, they are recasting and reshooting the whole thing. The weak-chinned O'Loughlin will still be the unsexy undead, but the ditzy female lead is recast (I couldn't concur more) and the old vampire mentor, who I didn't have an issue with, has been ditched in favour of a younger model. Jason Dohring to be precise, who did such an amazing job playing complex bad-boy Logan in Veronica Mars. I'll admit that I have a bit of a crush on this guy and he is one of few people who could have possibly inspired me to give this dreadful show a second chance!
Unfortunately I doubt that any number of reshoots could save this show, O'Loughlin is wrong for the role. Dohring will outshine him, and I hope it succeeds for his sake. But as an advocate of the genre, based on the pilot, no Buffy fan will bother with this shoddy affair.
http://www.cbs.com/primetime/moonlight/
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