Choices - Hooten and the Lady and Hunters

Meh.

So, I talked a bit before about the fact that the current golden age of TV drama is actually a glut of product which not only allows, but requires that the viewer make choices. Or if I didn't then I meant to and just got distracted. It happens. Anyway, my latest choices not to watch are Hooten & the Lady and Hunters.

Hooten & the Lady is okay, but it's a show of another era. He's a lovable rogue, she's a posh academic; they fight crime, or at least retrieve antiquities. It's not the central dynamic I object to, not that she is comically inept in an actual fight, nor even the forced and unconvincing sexual tension. It just feels kind of weird to be watching a modern set show that is so... colonial. Our leads, a posh white Brit and a rough and tumble, mercenary Yank, travel to exotic locales, meet locals who mysteriously need a British Museum researcher and a raider of tombs to do what we will generously call archaeology for them, and retrieve priceless cultural artefacts in a quippy and irreverent fashion. Egypt in particular has a very established archaeological community and little need to bring in freewheeling, site-dynamiting dilettantes to do for them.

Yick.

On the other hand, at least it isn't Hunters, which tried to win me over to the side of its unlovable 'heroes' by introducing a heavy who puts women in cages, lures prostitutes into gratuitous threesomes in order to drill holes in their spines and makes out with his alien baby-mamma on the corpse, then murders his own child rather than allow it to be held by the humans. It's just plain nasty, and lacks the weighty substance needed to validate the unpleasantness. And, however vile the villain, our heroes are still jerks.

Sometimes you wonder why a series has been cancelled; not with Hunters. I might watch Hooten & the Lady if I found myself at a loose end; I'd have to be at my wits' end to go back to Hunters.

Hunters - 'The Beginning and the End'

Earth's only line of defence is so gloriously low-tech.

Ironically, given its title, the pilot episode of new and already cancelled alien hunting series Hunters begins at neither the beginning nor the end, but in the middle, with a man manipulating music files on a computer while a naked woman lies hogtied in a cage next to hutches full of rabbits.

So, this is the bad guy, okay. The heroes may be asshats, but this dude keeps naked ladies in cages.

Flash back 72 hours and we get to see a bit of the captive, Abby Carroll, living her normal life with her FBI husband, Flynn and their foster daughter whose dad was Flynn's late partner. Damn this guy's family life is complicated. I bet he's really deep and interesting, says the imaginary viewer for whom this show is being written. Abby is kidnapped by the bad man, who just to drive the point home gets all close in and rapey before incapacitating the half-deaf woman with a sonic weapon.

To find Abby, Flynn is roped into the Exo-Terrorism Unit, a group of cross-agency, slightly international alien Hunters working out of a 1990s police procedural set, using sonic weapons adapted by those used by the 'Hunters', their human-looking alien quarry. He works with ETU agents Regan and Riggs to try to catch our bad man - I think his human alias is McCarthy or something - but they fuck it up, largely because they are fuck ups and incapable of maintaining any kind of tactical formation.

So, are we clear on who the baddy is?

And therein lies the real problem. The leads are a bunch of fuck ups, lacking not only redeeming features, but also convincing reasons to be on this team. In terms of character, Carroll is a growly misanthrope who loves only his wife (and possibly the foster daughter, while also feeling unable to look after her properly on his own,) Riggs is Australian and Regan is impulsive, and probably an alien. The Hunters are pretty one-note - they really have to be to hold onto the bad guy flag against this bunch of chuckleheads - with their human appearance, animalistic snarling and rapey, big game hunter overtones. Maybe there will be more nuance later.