My mom slept through Friday’s episode. I watched it but was not impressed. Such a waste of a potentially good concept!
Zed annoys me. Flirty Constantine annoys me. (I don’t know how much of a flirt he is in the comics, beyond using it to get what he wants, but it seems weird). Some of the dialogue was just this side of cheesy. No Chaz, no Manny. Boo.
Maybe we should count this episode as the second pilot, and hope things improve with the third episode? It’s worth a shot. 
The pilot episode wasn’t great by any means, but it was better than this ep. if this episode is more indicative of what the season is going to be like, it doesn’t bode well.
Where do I know the priest from? He was very familiar but I can’t place him.
I think I’ve seen him around in quite a few things, but the one that jumps to mind is as one of the oxy junkies in Justified, that helps drive the runaway girl and save/threaten Raylan at different times.
Liv had a dad with a huge background, plus a secret lair full of interesting things. Replacing her with a homeless artist doesn’t seem to up the quantity of things they can do with the character.
On the TV show Lost, they ended up firing Michelle Rodriguez and Cynthia Watros, because the two of them were boozing it up and acting crazy. But here’s what the producers said about the event:
[
](Dotdash Meredith - America's Largest Digital & Print Publisher)
Agreed. Ep2 was just dull. Hope they can get some excitement going with the next few eps. It’d be nice also if banishing demons was a little more than Constantine just muttering a few words… like the effort behind it would be nice.
My problem with the episode is that I just didn’t give a damn about any of the characters. Oh, Constantine is going to stop a demon, he seems bored. Oh look, drawing girl turns out whiny and annoying. The big CEO of the mine is going to die? Meh, let him, then the episode might end early. Oh, the priest we’ve known for 2 minutes found his faith again? Who cares!
I don’t think those were flaws inherent in the characters, I think the writing was just bad.
Plus, there was the super obvious Chekov’s gun in the first act:
Constantine: So, where are you from?
Dead Guy’s Wife: I’m a Romani princess with access to magic that was tricking into marrying some schlub and now I hate this town and the mine.
Constantine: Well, I’m sure none of that is plot relevant information. Wanna make out?
Dead Guy’s Wife: Oh hell yes!
Constantine: I changed my mind.
Dead Guy’s Wife: Get out!
Constantine: Oh yea, pissing off the wife of a dead guy during the memorial when all his beefy friends are here was probably a bad idea.
I mean come on, the writing has got to get more clever. The Cinematrography is great, and the theme is interesting, but the episodes are just coming off so BORING.
I’m still on the fence about this show. I want to like it, but little things bug me. I’ll keep watching it, for now.
This is one of the things that bug me: I feel like every now and then his dialect doesn’t quite match his accent. Like, for some reason it bugs me a little every time he says “mate” (just a little). I know the actor is Welsh, and I also know that I’m an American with nothing other than 2 years spent in Yorkshire as a kid (30 years ago) and a love of BBC America programming to go by, so I try to ignore it. But there are moments when I’d swear his accent is fake. It takes me out of the show every time.
That was James LeGros, who – as Sage Rat says – has been in a bunch of stuff. I don’t watch Justified, but most recently I saw him last year on Revenge (where he also played a priest).
YES. How anyone could hear that and not immediately think “gypsy…hey!” is beyond me.
Actually, they should have gotten rid of the smoking entirely, vis-a-vis the end of the Film.
I may stop watching it due to the smoking.
Nothing they were going to do with the smoking was going to make people happy. If he doesn’t smoke people will complain that they bailed on an iconic bit of the character, if he does than people will complain they’re encouraging a potentially deadly habit.
Their solution seems to be to try and show that he smokes while never actually showing him with a cigarette. I’m sure it still won’t make anyone happy, but I kinda like it. It’s clever, if nothing else.
The iconic bit ended with the end of the Film. Just take it from there. Have him have some of his ex-smokers habits, etc…
I can’t do it. The acting is just awful. The bit where Constantine is standing there telling the girl to close her eyes and focus on the dove in the snowstorm or whatever made my physically cringe.
Chalk up another DC universe failure.
The Film that apparently absolutely no comic book fan of Hellblazer considers to be canon? 
Couldn’t care less if he smokes, myself. Smoking rarely adds much of anything to tv.
Yeah, I could care less about fanboys.
It was a major plot point at one time, he was essentially dying of lung cancer. Some of his usual combination con artist/magician crap got him out of it. More or less. With the usual messy fallout.
He’s kind of a don’t-give-a-damn (or maybe don’t think things through) character a lot of the time. He does stuff on the fly. He doesn’t take care of people he supposedly cares about. Most of his actions come back to bite him later on.
The smoking thing was part of that (I’m talking about the comic here - never saw the movie.).
Also those comic fans (who were REALLY upset that John Constantine wouldn’t be chain smoking in the show) are, I’m sure, who the network assumed would be the core of viewers for the show. You piss them off, and you are basically asking not to get picked up for a full season order.
Of course with episodes like the 2nd one, you are asking the same thing.
Hardly. If every one of those fanboys was glued to his set it wouldnt even make a blip in the ratings, sales were under 10,000 per issue. . The comic was so popular it was *canceled due to poor sales. *
What they are looking for are people who watched the Film, which has the same name and grossed $230,884,728.
In other words, maybe 10,000 fanboys bought the comic. Some 20 million people saw the film.
And yet the comic was so popular it spawned a feature film and a television series. The comic character is also somewhat iconic:
Obviously they aren’t looking at the people who watched the Film considering the premise is more faithful to the comic series, including the whole British lead thing.
In addition, it would just seem silly to have a comic book TV show focusing on a movie released almost a decade ago that was a moderate success but critically mixed. It’d be like releasing a Daredevil TV show based on the 2003 movie and not the super popular comic book.
They have to be. Sure it was "longest-running and most successful title of DC’s Vertigo imprint"but note those last three words. Vertigo is a tiny imprint of the giant DC comics. It still never sold 10000 copies per issue. **