Goosbumps
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.
Many people, especially those of my Dad's generation, were very excited when they heard about the Perry Mason reboot. Perry Mason starring Raymond Burr was a television staple during their childhoods from 1957 to 1966. In fact Burr was so popular as Mason that they brought him back for TV movies throughout my childhood too! Now most reviews started by saying that "this isn't your father's Perry Mason" but I beg to differ, because by the end, after an initially rough pilot episode, the show found it's feet and got Parry into the courtroom defending a mother who most definitely didn't kill her child. Most people in fact were up in arms that Perry didn't start out as a lawyer and was a PI for the first few episodes. Well here's something that may shock you, yes, this series pays tribute to the original series, especially in the final episode's credits when a certain theme song is heard, but they weren't taking just from the series, they were pulling from the books. I know! Perry Mason started out in books! Erle Stanley Gardner wrote eighty books from the thirties to the sixties ranking him third in best selling book series of all time just below a certain boy wizard and Goosebumps! Also, what's fascinating about the series is that Perry as a person and in particular Perry's past isn't explored at all. We know more about his dining habits than about his personal habits. This, in my mind, made Perry perfect for a prequel if you will. And by no means is PI Perry dragged out. We learn about his family farm, his military service, his estranged wife, his child, and his struggles to make it, before becoming a lawyer. It's a good story for the early thirties and an America struggling to recover from The Great Depression. Though, as previously mentioned, the pilot is a little rocky, my guess is this is because it was written for Robert Downey Jr. to star in and it obviously had his acting quirks put into the script so when Matthew Rhys donned the mantel of Mason it took awhile to knock the Robert Downey Jr. out of the material. But I can honestly say, by the end of the first season I was grateful a second season was on the way, which I didn't initially think I would be. 
