(This has been touched on in this thread, but after the latest episode I finally decided to start a seperate thread.)
Okay, the series started off with a seemingly supernatural mystery. I wondered if it would resolve with a realistic(ish) “I would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for you meddling kids” ending or if it would actually have “real” ghosts and curses. I look back now and see oh how naive I was, because the series is full-on balls-to-the-wall all-ghosts-all-the-time. Like, in Supernatural Sam and Dean at least had to drive around to find ghosts, but in the sleepy little town of Horseshoe Bay the cemetary has a revolving door.
So that was something to get used to. But last night they kicked the crazy up a level by introducing Tom Swift, who was flowing with science technobabble and a technology level both straight out of ST:TNG (or possibly Doctor Who–he did some pretty sonic screwdrivery stuff) and on the hunt for a magical-propertied meteorite dropped by a comet in the 1930s (and now returning at a blazing 2,000 miles per hour) so that it can be used to fuel a spaceship to send his father to Saturn. This would belong in the “one WTF episode” thread if it weren’t obvious this was a backdoor pilot for an unspeakably awful Tom Swift spinoff series.
Someone should actually do a decent Nancy Drew some day.
I would do the Secret of the Old Clock and I would set it in 1930, with cars that have running boards and cranks in the front. I’d film it in black and white, and try to capture the pace and feel of movies made in the 30s. I’d stick to the original plot pretty closely (minus the unnecessary racism bullshit like the minstrel-show speech and behavior of the caretaker). It’s actually a pretty good story line and ought to make a good movie. So would The Hidden Staircase.
I cannot speak for Nancy Drew, but I always wanted to see The Hardy Boys made into a show where each book/episode progressed with the era in which it was written. The background would age historically each show as it did for the actual books, but the characters would not age at all. Ideally the series would start in the late twenties and go through the sixties.
The episode from the other week didn’t have any supernatural elements to it. It was presented as supernatural, but everything had a mundane explanation. There was also some social commentary about how missing white girls get all the attention.
I gave up on Nancy Drew as soon as I saw ghosts were real in the first episode. That’s not Nancy Drew, why not just use a new character? Did they learn nothing from when they tried the real ghosts on Scooby Doo for a while?( Not to mention making Shag and Scoob vegetarians!)
Yet another teenager played by someone that looks like they are thirty. I don’t get why they can’t cast a 20 year old as a teenager. It’s not like these kind of shows need Emmy caliber performers.
That girl creeps me right the fuck out for some reason. I gave up on the show where she had superpowers after 10 minutes because I find her so off putting.
I am a bit disappointed with the supernatural aspect, but by now I have learned to roll with it. And the straight Chinese young woman possessed by the lesbian French (probably about the same age) woman is interesting A bit bittersweet that her English lover moved on and had happy life and is not a ghost.
I like that Nancy’s biological father, while not a paragon of virtue, is at least trying to be a good person.
I was liking the Bess story line how she actually impressed the Marvin matriarch but then had to ruin it by stealing the brooch.
I still like the actress playing Nancy, and while this show is not that good it is good enough that I continue to watch.
Maybe it accurately reflects the accent of the time and place where Odette grew up in (back then, was a Le Havre accent the same as a Marseilles accent?)
OK, that probably isn’t the explanation… (to be generous to Leah Lewis, it could be due to the CW not wanting to spend money on a dialect coach)
The good Nero Wolfe (the A&E version, not the dreadful ABC one) kind of did this.
As for Nancy, my younger daughter loves Nancy. I read about 35 of the books to her and she and her sister played all the video games. But when she got one look at the description of this series, she said “no way.”
BTW the Hardy Boys series that ran on the original Mickey Mouse Club was okay, at least to my eight year old self.
I’ll venture into heresy here and say I wish they could have plucked Maury Chaykin out of the A&E series and put him in the ABC series, which had a better Archie and Saul Panzer. Timothy Hutton chewed so much scenery as Archie he was painful to watch. He may s well have dressed in a purple pin striped zoot suit and walked around spinning a pocket watch on a chain.
I’m watching…but I’m not quite sure why, myself. There’s nothing specific I can point to as being particularly engaging or compelling, and yet…I find myself watching, week after week.
I agree that the first few episodes treated the existence of the supernatural ambiguously, before the show took a hard turn, into, just, like all the ghosts. A visiting character commented, “Stephen King is right. Maine is just full of angry ghosts.” Which seems like the show’s mission statement, at this point.
I agree this latest episode played like a backdoor pilot for a Tom Swift series, and was wonky even by the standards of this series. Although I think Tom Swift was clearly supposed to be Not!Tony Stark, not a character from ST: TNG, or The Doctor.
The Bobbsey Twins are already recurring characters. At this point, for some reason the show runners seem to be creating a Stratemeyer Syndicate Cinematic Universe. It’s probably only a matter of time before the Hardy Boys show up, and the Rover Boys and Putnam Hall military academy are probably just down the road from Horseshoe Bay…
BTW, Tom Swift* mentions that he was named for his father, and that his father is a Major and an astronaut, which would make his father Major Tom…
*Which makes him Tom Swift, Jr., which is canon. Stratemeyer Syndicate published both a Tom Swift series of books, and later a Tom Swift, Jr. series.
I like Timothy Hutton better myself - and I believe he is the one who got the series going. The Saul on A&E was meh.
BTW, there is an Italian Nero, viewable on MHz which involves Nero and Archie fleeing the US to Italy. It has an Italian “Saul.” Interesting series. Better than the ABC one.