An odd choice for my first blog entry, I’ll admit. The other week I managed to get the DVD set for an excellent TV series from the mid-nineties: American Gothic. I hadn’t seen for almost ten years, so I was fully expecting it not to be as good as I remembered (and also to have dated rather badly). However, it was even better than I remembered, and is a series I would definitely recommend to anyone who likes a touch (or outright push) of the supernatural on TV, and also to anyone who just likes a good story told by a very talented group of people.
The series follows events surrounding a 10-year old boy in a town called Trinity, which is completely under the thumb of an evil Sheriff, Lucas Buck. Under normal circumstances I’d hesitate to use the word evil, but these aren’t exactly normal circumstances. American Gothic deals with evil as a real and present threat. How? Not as some black-garbed creature with horns, a tail, and a fondness for fire – but as a man and his effect on other people. The Sheriff owns the local people by getting them into his debt; he’ll promise, and give, them what they have requested, but the price is higher than they should be willing to pay. He owns them by making them hate themselves, feeling self-loathing at what they’ve done to get just a little help: and in order to make these things happen he uses methods which normal humans could not. The best thing about this series is that things which don’t need explaining fully are simply left open to debate. There are many ways to interpret the roles that supernatural power, religion, the occult, and human weakness have, and you’ll find yourself viewing the story differently every time you watch it. Another thing which sets this series apart from the others is that the characters actually have depth. It’s not done in the same coarse way as most series (where characters tend to have one dimension until a particular episode is dedicated to revealing their inner traumas by suddenly showing you their past), it’s far more elegant than that – and makes this series one of my favourites.
To my surprise I actually remembered many of the 26 episodes very well. I was one of the people lucky enough to have first seen the series by watching all episodes in the correct order. CBS did this series a great disservice: not only did they only air 22 episodes, but they aired them in the wrong order because apparently they knew best… This leads to my one and only complaint about the DVD set: it’s in the wrong order!!! Instead of using this release as a chance to list the episodes in their intended order, they have been put back in the order CBS originally showed them. The four episodes which were cut have been put… right after the end of the series *rolls eyes*. Something tells me this release wasn’t a labour of love. This leads to plot inconsistencies which, while not devastating, are rather annoying. If you want to watch it in the right order there’s a fair bit of disc swapping, but it’s well worth it. I’d been worried at first having read a review that said the DVD kept skipping and that the image quality wasn’t good: having watched through all of the DVDs it didn’t skip once, and as for the image… it’s not the same clarity you get with brand new series made for HD televisions, but it’s still incredibly good. If anything the occasional dark bordering-on-grainy scene simply adds to the darker and more twisted moments. If you haven’t seen this series yet, now is the chance.
OMG I loved that series!!