by Kirsty Walker

This year at San Diego Comic-Con the WB network brought three pilots from their upcoming fall schedule. Here are our first thoughts :

Human Target

Mark Valley (Fringe) plays Christopher Chance, a private investigator/bodyguard/ass kicker, assisted by Chi McBride (Pushing Daises) and Jackie Earle Haley (Watchmen) who play Winston and Guerrero.

Valley is a proper old-fashioned leading man, he’s handsome, smart, strong and flawed. The back up from McBride as the office-based investigator, and Haley as the shifty criminal who can be trusted for as long as the money keeps coming, forms a nice trio who riff well off each other. The show leaves a breadcrumb trail for Chance losing the plot, to pad out the adventure-a-week format.

The action scenes are excellent, this pilot had a particularly awesome fight in a ventilation shaft, and the script is funny and nicely paced, though the show is nothing new or original. Based on a DC comic, it seems it will be similarly episodic.

4/5

V

The eighties series remade with a few twists, V was the most anticipated pilot of the con. It begins with excellent effects by Zoic of a few earthquake-like tremors and then the appearance of huge spacecraft hovering over the major cities of the world.

Lost’s Elizabeth Mitchell plays an FBI agent investigating a sleeper cell with her partner (guest star Alan Tudyk of Firefly) as well as managing a recent divorce and a teenage son. When the Alien ‘Visitors’ reveal themselves she is sceptical, and winds up being led to an underground meeting where a similarly minded bunch do not trust the new too-good-to-be-true visitors, who have promised health care and technological advances in exchange for water and minerals.

The Visitors appear to be slightly better version of humans, led by a beauty in the shape of Morena Baccarin. They start to recruit ‘ambassadors’ amongst the humans to spread the message that the Visitors are here only for good, One of those recruited is Agent Evans’ son Tyler, which sets up a mother son battle of wills with more at stake than usual.

The performances are strong but there’s just something about V that dissatisfies me, it seems like it’s struggling to find it’s heart amongst the FX and I wasn’t convinced it can succeed. I get the feeling it will run out of steam before Season 2 can look like troubling the airwaves. Still, should be worth a look.

3.5/5

Vampire Diaries

Kevin Williamson has timed Vampire Diaries perfectly to jump on the coat tails of Twilight, the vampire/human love story currently making every tween girl slightly crazy.

Vampire Diaries is smarter, wittier and more engaging than Twilight and has the added bonus of being episodic so the reveals and plot twists can be steadily rolled out and given the attention they deserve. It is kind of a season 3 Buffy meets Dawson’s Creek (which Williamson of course created) and has a well drawn ensemble cast who are archetypes but who nevertheless engage the interest. The lead actress Nina Dobrev (Elena) is sparky and cute but with a lot of angst, her parents have been recently killed in a car crash. She keeps a diary, as does our lead boy Stefan (Paul Wesley), only hers are pretty recent and his date back to the 1800s, being as he is, a vampire. He enrols in her school to stalk her for some as yet unexplained reason, and as the sexy, slightly weird new kid he is the fish out of water who catches her interest.

Ian Somerhalder arrives late in the episode as Damon, Stefan’s brother. He is an effective villain, all floppy hair and sadism. Seems that he’s responsible for a recent spate of killings, although Stefan has also been finding it hard to mask his primal instinct. The scene is set for a battle over Elena’s soul, and fangirls, start up your laptops, these two brothers are slashier than the Winchesters.

I enjoyed Vampire Diaries most out of the pilots, simply because it’s fun and engaging. Visually it’s lovely, very much in the style of Dawson’s Creek, and the young cast are easy to warm to. Somerhalder does a great job as Damon, having fun with a funny, sexy role. Don’t be surprised if some of the Twilighters switch sides after this airs in the autumn.

4/5