rowan.depomerai

I’m sitting in front of the telly, watching (on my shiny cable on-demand system) BBC3’s new drama, The Things I Haven’t Told You. The Radio Times amusingly described it as another tepid drama pilot where the brief was most likely: “Make it like Skins. But you know, different.”

Thing is, they’re right. Someone said, “Ooh, Skins is good. Let’s do something similar.” Then they made a tick list along the lines of sex, drugs, school, edgy lighting, internet references, cool music…. etc. They implemented each of these, almost invariably not too well. Especially the music, which just never feels quite right. Don’t even get me started on the hideous chat room references, which are so forced, unrealistic and outdated that I really did want to cringe. Then, they looked for other ideas to use. Like a dead person who does occasional voice overs. Very Desperate Housewives. And let’s be really mysterious and leave lots of unanswered questions, a bit like Lost. Why not?

The whole thing just feels really self-conscious. Trying to be cool, trying to be trendy. Problem is, to my mind at least, it misses the mark. Quite badly. I’m trying not to judge too much on one episode, after all, I do see some potential. But the problem is, I’m not likely to tune in again to find out. If only it just wasn’t quite so far up its own backside. Shame really. I wanted it to be good.

[n.b. I probably ought to point out, just to be absolutely clear, that this is just my opinion, and obviously the fact that I work for the BBC is not relevant here!]

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 9:33 pm and is filed under Personal Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.