The Buccaneers
Back in the nineties everyone was obsessed with the new adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice with moist Colin Firth. I wasn't an exception to this rule, I was fully committed, six tape VHS boxset and all watched over and over again. But there were two other period pieces I gravitated towards more often, mainly because you could always stumble across one or the other in the middle of the night on upper cable channels. I'm talking about Louisa May Alcott's The Inheritance and Edith Wharton's The Buccaneers. For years I didn't know what either was called, in my mind it was TV movie with mom from Family Ties with Greg from Dharma and Greg and the miniseries with girl from Son in Law. And yes, that's the Pauly Shore movie. I don't think it was until the advent of Netflix that I was finally able to watch all of The Buccaneers in order, but I loved watching it knowing so much of the cast from other shows I loved. I recently had time to rewatch it and the ending left me cold. The women were pushed aside for the men to take center stage which narratively made absolutely no sense at all. Which made me super excited when I heard that Apple was going to be making a new adaptation of the Wharton book. And not to put to fine a point on it, but she never finished the book so there's a lot of liberties you can take, which Apple of course was quick to capitalize on, hello Lesbians! But I was also worried, would they go all Gossip Girl with this? Or, horror of horrors, Bridgerton? And while yes, you could see they were veering toward the wisteria laden land of the Bridgertons, thankfully without trying to pass off modern music as "art," there was actually a more Clueless vibe. I had hope. At least in the beginning. I was baffled by them starting the show quite far into the story and making Saratoga Springs out to be like it's in the sticks, when it wasn't, it was about new money versus old money, and then there was the swapping of character traits and backstories in an attempt to make it fresh. OK, I can kind of see where you're going, but the main problem was they created this to be a series so while the adaptation in the nineties covered ground fairly quickly here, once the girls get to England, the story stagnates. Nothing happens. They brood over their lives and then get together and scream. A lot. There's a lot of childish hen night behavior used to pad the episodes. And Nan's courtship would never drap on this long. The episode though that broke me was the Christmas episode. Nan's love interest looks like he's wearing Colin Firth's sweater from Bridget Jones's Diary. In the library there's a globe with Alaska on it. And then to add insult to injury, they take the loving governess Miss Testvalley and turn her into Mary Kay Letourneau. It's not spelled out, but given how her three charges turned out, I think she sexually abused them all, preying on them from the shadows. It's just so fucking creepy. There could have been depth here but there's no depth at all, it's all lets run around and giggle without evolving. And as for the "ending!?!" Nan gives everything up for her evil sister? Nope. No way. That's it for me. The least I expected was a reveal that Miss Testvalley was Nan's mother, instead Miss Testvalley is a pedophile and they decided to do a Dynasty and hold the reveal of Nan's mother until next season to see if they can get a big name star. My advice to anyone offered this role? Run, don't walk. You do not want to be involved in this trainwreck.
The Goosebumps series by R.L. Stine started in summer 1992. Seeing as I viewed myself as a sophisticated adult because I was just about to start high school I wasn't the target demographic. That would have been my brother who is four years younger than me. He loved authors like John Bellairs, so of course this fell into his wheelhouse. He wasn't a fanatic because his main loves were video games and WWF and WCW wrestling, but I remember him having a few books on his shelves, particularly Night of the Living Dummy. One thing R.L. Stine gets is what Rod Serling did before him, and that's that dummies are terrifying. Which is lucky, because this season is all about Stine's evil dummy. For the most part. It's about how the dummy has influenced, one might even say destroyed, two generations in Port Lawrence, Washington. The problem is it's hard to categorize this show, there's a nostalgia element but there's a lot of cheese too. You have horrific moments and then you have Justin Long doing some of the most insane physical humor you will ever see as the dummy possesses him. There's no inbetween. And the show isn't able to find a common ground. It doesn't know what it wants to be and I think this is because it's made by Disney. It wants to reach the widest audience possible so it hedges its bets. When it could go dark it goes funny, when it could go terrifying it goes gross. In that regard it does kind of want to be Buffy the Vampire Slayer, even with an alum of that show, the late and unlamented Forrest. But here's the thing, even Buffy wasn't able to find the sweet spot in telling a story about an evil dummy. The season one episode "The Puppet Show" is one of those ones if I was a person who skipped episodes when rewatching favorite shows I just might skip. It's a shame Sid had to show up in the second Buffy video game, because he's a horrible fighter, but it is what it is. What I'm trying to say is that it's like a once in a lifetime situation to get this balance right and in the end Goosebumps failed. I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt, because there are solid episodes here, but the finale left me cold. Instead of bringing our Port Lawrence Scooby Gang together to vanquish the big bad instead we get a rambling episode about the origins of the dummy. We're in Egypt and traveling circuses, we're far away from our core cast. The town then gets possessed by the dummy and everyone has makeup like the henchmen from the Buffy musical as my brother pointed out. And I guess they win, it's very convoluted and Justin Long appears to still be possessed at the end and that's where we're left. Because while the show was renewed it was renewed as an anthology. So guess what? Next season we'll get new stories and characters that they might just as well leave on another cliffhanger. I mean, really!?! I invested my time in this uneven show and I'm not going to get closure!?! Not to mention that I feel like I need therapy because I realized I'm now the age of the parents of the teens on the show. At least the flashbacks to their high school years had the requisite amount of flannel. The flannel is all I have to comfort me now.
