Two shamefully bad shows that have grown into the ultimate guilty pleasures. True Blood in that it was a once-promising show that has devolved into a parody of itself. And Whodunnit in that it is probably the single worst show I have ever watched from start to finish…yet I found unexplainable enjoyment in it the worse it got.
True Blood…The sixth season finale ended with a haze of “what the hell?” as the show continued its long, slow march into self-parody. The pacing of True Blood cranked up somewhere in season 3 and it’s never looked back since then. It’s now become more known for having 2 dozen plot lines going on at any given time and letting its main characters do things that make no sense from scene to scene. The characters are now so often “out of character” that it’s a little hard to feel like we know them.
The first half of this episode involved the “struggle” to stop Warlow (a fairy-vampire that could have been infinitely more interesting than he wound up being…mostly because, again, they kept changing everything we knew about him from episode to episode) and it’s a true sign of how shoddy this show is that a character who’s supposedly been alive for over 5,000 years is defeated in about five minutes. This confrontation should have played out over several episodes rather than a few minutes before we get to the real meat of things: a six month jump forward where we see that Sookie (the all-time champion of ultra-frustrating, wishy-washy, and downright boring TV characters) is dating Alcide, and that 1/8th of the vampire population is infected with Hepatitis V, engineered to kill vampires but actually turning them into something close to zombies that are now headed for the small town all of our major characters are in. Plus, Eric was last seen burning on a hilltop in Iceland. Uh-oh…Well, at least the always-neglected Sam is given something interesting to do for once as the town’s newly elected mayor and soon-to-be-father thanks to the radiant Jurnee Smollet carrying his shifter child. Grade for the season: I can’t even grade this show anymore. You either give in to the horror cartoon True Blood has become or you don’t, and I’ve chosen to embrace it.
Whodunnit…A really dumb show (reality TV meets Clue) where contestants are given a chance to solve a murder and the person who gets it most wrong is next week’s victim, all of it leading up to a big reveal where one of them wins and one of them is the killer. Tonight was the season (and please God, series) finale and I decided to watch since——for some crazy reason——I’ve been watching the whole time. [Spoilers] Ex-beauty queen Cris was the killer (which anyone could have figured out since she’s the only one who’s never been up for elimination and several other things that pointed right at her) and Cam (the only player with a functioning brain) was the winner of the 250,000 dollars because the last handful of people he was competing against might be legally retarded and he solved riddles faster than they could.
Something about this show always felt wholesale cheesy but also deeply insincere. Really, Cam or Cris or a half a dozen others could have just as easily been the killer since they all felt more like paid actors than real people. It made it hard to really root for anyone, and also raised serious questions about cheating and the fairness of a game where one of the contestants is a killer who can influence it (if one of the players is the killer then isn’t the team the killer happens to be on more likely to survive…as happened this time?). The moment when the killer is “unmasked” (“wait…it was you?!”) is cheese ball heaven. Grade for series: C-…Grade as an “I can’t believe I’m watching this shit” ultimate guilty pleasure: A-