New SciFi show: Charlie Jade

What are your thoughts? For me it’s hard to tell yet; a whole hour just to get set up? They should have gone with a two-hour pilot. And I found having the whole thing filmed in Noirvision™ rather annoying.

It was made here in Cape Town, so it had that going for it.

We had it here about 3 years ago now. I liked the beginning episodes a lot, but it lost some of the hey-wow factor for me somewhere - too slow to get things out. Some nice ideas, nice setup, but the camera work & lighting do get annoying after a while. I liked the lead guy, though, and also the villain dude, 01-Boxer. When you meet the black American dude, though, maybe you’ll see why I didn’t like him so much.

It reminded me a little (in cinematic sensibilities) of Total Recall: 2070, another Canadian SF series not too many people seemed to have watched, that I liked a lot. Probably because we got it on free-to-air with all the nudity and violence intact.

It was very draggy and only began to be interesting in the last ten minutes. Still, the concept seems like a nice twist of parallel worlds, and I think the second episode will improve once they no longer have to set up the situation.

Interesting that it was originally broadcast in South Africa. I was wondering why the woman who had been displaced came from Cape Town.

Well, I’ve seen worse. Very film noir-ish. It felt a little Bladerunner at times. The scene at the water reservoir with the universes switching kinda reminded me of the video game Riven. Inside the reservoir it felt a bit La Cité des enfants perdus, or maybe Brazil or Dark City, but with a lower-budget Forever Knight or worse, Knight Rider kind of feel.

If I sat down and thought about it, I could probably pick out bits and pieces from a dozen shows and movies. But hey, this one’s got different actors, so I’ll give it a few eps to see how it develops. Just the fact it’s South African makes me interested.

Before I watched it, I read about it on Wikipedia, and that really helped me stay with the first viewing.

They can do this, but they couldn’t keep Dresden on the air?

It too early to tell if this is good or not at this point.

They’re not really doing anything. The show was made in 2004 for one season by a Canadian and South African co-production and all Scifi is doing is re-running it. SciFi didn’t have anything to do with it, so this probably isn’t costing them much.

Anybody know if a rerun is scheduled? My usual source (zap2it) seems to say “no”.

Sorry for the zombie thread, but the show just recently finished its airing here in the US. If you managed to watch it, you had to have set your DVR to catch its overnight showing.

So, did anyone else manage to catch the whole thing? I just watched the final episode last night. It was pretty interesting, and I’m actually glad I kept watching. A second season might have been cool.

I only managed to watch the first one. But I did manage to dvr all but one of the rest of them despite the weird scheduling. I haven’t gotten around to watching them yet, I’m gonna have to be in just the right mood. Does seem like an interesting premise though, and it definitely has atmosphere up the wazoo. I think a second season was riding on it doing well on the scifi channel so I don’t think we’re gonna see that.

I’ll warn you the first handful of eps after the pilot get a little disturbing at times, and you might feel they’re trying too hard to be edgy. I almost stopped watching. But then it finds its tone, and it gets interesting again without being so disturbing. I read they swapped out the creative team after ep 8, which explains that.

I don’t think a second season was ever a possibility, since the show was canceled in 2005 I think. If they were still hoping a Scifi run would help, boy did they pick the wrong network. 3 AM???

I think those first 8 episodes made the execs nervous.