#4 Misfits

Every once in a while, maybe once or twice a year, something comes along, a song, a band, a movie, or in this case a TV show, that you take an instant dizzy addiction to.

For me, this is one of those.

On the shelf, it sounded as one of those things most likely to suck, with a small but significant chance of being totally awesome. Sure, sometimes teens with superpowers stories turn out to be Runaways, filled with all the fun and angst of adolescenthood and sometimes it's Heroes filled with cardboard characters, spectacle and using a dour mood to create the illusion of depth. Man...I'm so sick of all that time travel.

But, this recommendation came courtesy of Buckley, whose tastes and mine overlap on average about 70% of the time, but when it comes to all things British, our anglophilia chromosomes exhibit similarities in something like the 98th percentile. So I went into this pretty assured that this was going to be good.

How good?

First off, you have the delinquent teens in question. On most television shows, they'd show their delinquency by doing some cute shoplifting, maybe smarting off to some dickish authority that totally deserved it, you know, getting your sympathy the easy way by being more rebellious in the ways that a whole lot of people wish they were but without straying too far out of the norm as to be alarming.

Not quite so these kids. In the first episode there's more swearing and sexually explicit language than I've ever heard on a show this side of the pond that wasn't HBO, there's drug use, and most of all, these delinquents aren't just unpleasant to authority, they're just generally unpleasant for most of it. It gets set up like you're being dared not to like them.

I mean, you have Nathan, who even after we get shown that his outer asshole exterior is masking inner pain, it doesn't in the least mean that the writers pretend that he doesn't still act like a total asshole and would be wholly annoying to be around, if funny to watch through a little box. Christ that kid has some comic timing though.

The plotting for the rest of the first season (I'm midway through the second season which has so far taken some weird turns that I'm not sure how I feel about, so bear with me) is just A+ work. For all the possibilities of deus ex machina that turn up when a story's being told that involves superpowers, these are used sparingly and nearly without exception, to clever effect. The characters get in trouble when they fuck up instead of having the plot rely on a false pretense that a really shite idea come up with by say, Simon, is a good idea and will work because it works for the story. The tension is built masterfully leading up to the last episode of season one. Though one part of the tale involves a story we've all seen before it's shot through with such believable sadness and loneliness, and doesn't take the easy way out by dividing people into good and evil, that it ranks with some of my favorite TV storytelling.

So, tune in and thank me later. Remember, never fuck a wounded bear and Charles Darwin once said you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.