…because apparently the recording heads on my VCR needed cleaning and I didn’t realize it. So when I came home from my bowling league and kicked back with the tape my loving wife made for me, I got regular snow on the screen every five seconds. It was like trying to watch it through a blizzard. Tracking adjustments didn’t help and switching decks didn’t help; it was in the tape. I tried to push past it, but after three minutes I couldn’t take it anymore because it was just so dámņëd distracting.
So I’m interested in what you all thought of it, but me…I got nothin’.
PAD
• 
Nekouken: “PAD, I didn’t see it, but I have a question for you: Why not just get Tivo? It’s much better than relying on a jittery VCR.”
I tried TiVo. It’s an overpriced piece of junk. I took it back within a week.
Btw, can someone tell me how to format text here?
Here’s my review, which is available (along with my reviews of all the new shows of the season) at http://AAUGH.com/tv/
It does contain spoilers.
I was predisposed to liking BIRDS OF PREY, the new female adventure series on The WB. I was expecting something that would tie the sensibilities of Buffy in with the mythos from the Batman comics. And I was disappointed on both ends.
The set-up is that Barbara Gordon, the former Batgirl now planted firmly in a wheelchair, acts as the brains of a superpower duo while Helena Kyle, the love-child of Batman and Catwoman, handles the physical end of crime-fighting. They are joined by a teenage lass with ill-defined psychic powers, and together they fight crime in a highly stylized version of “New Gotham”.
The dialog is stiff, lifeless, and inhuman. The visual style uses a lot of photographic tricks that distract from the story rather than enrich it (which, admittedly, copies the method of some popular comics of a decade back). As for the links to the Batman mythos, they rely on it in the worst ways. There are things that get said which only make sense if you already know some of the Batman material, and not just the stuff you see in the movies. When Barbara explains that she had another name before she was known as Oracle, that statement makes sense… to those who have read the comics in which she is known as Oracle. However, unless I missed it, that was the first time that the Oracle name was mentioned in this show, and since Barbara and Helena’s operation is secret, there doesn’t seem to be anyone who would know Barbara as Oracle.
Meanwhile, the richness of the Batman mythos is wasted as we have a Joker without insanity, a Harley Quinn without joy, a Catwoman who cannot defend herself, and an apparently cowardly Batman. What we end up with is a lifeless, humorless spectacle with little sense of adventure.
About the only redeeming aspect of this is the very appropriate casting of Dina Meyer as Barbara Gordon. She manage to convey the sharpness and intelligence that comics writers John Ostrander and Kim Yale had given Oracle when they established that identity after Alan Moore had Batgirl crippled. Making Oracle seem intelligent is no small achievement, given that the script actually conveyed little if any of that intelligent. (Hey everyone: there’s a business partnership in which three of the four partners have been killed. Whose your main suspect? Anyone? Come on, someone out there must have the answer…)
Still, that’s not enough to save the show. A shame, given the effective (if often repetitive) reimagining of Superman that the WB has given us in Smallville.
Tho both BoP and SV come from Tollin/Robbins, that doesn’t really ensure anything in terms of content, as both shows have completely different writing staffs, and so far as I know (and feel free to correct me, anyone in the know), TRP doesn’t have much creative input into SV outside of “Make Lana perfect (and occasionally cringingly 2-dimensional) all the time.” I assume since Rollins directed the BoP pilot, that TRP has more input into that show, whereas SV is really Millar & Gough’s baby.
Me, I’m still pulling for Clark to wake up (again) and smell the hottie that is Miss Chloe Sullivan. I mean–hello! Babe *and* she fell for Clark himself, not some imaginary Clark she only ever saw through a telescope.
Boys, even fictional ones, occasionally need to be smacked upside the head repeatedly with a kryptonite-dusted 2×4.
Anyway… topic. I like what I’ve seen of Laeta K. in interviews, but that could just be my love of the pre-Crisis Huntress comics talking. But the show has 8 eps to hook me solidly. if not, it’s bye-bye Birdies.
Thomas Moudry: meant to mention–there was a live-action Wonder Woman series in development a few years back. Deborah Joy Levine, who developed “Lois & Clark” for television (and was exec. prod. 1st season–you know, before it started to become lame) was behind it, but it got stalled at the casting stage, which was a shame, because DJL’s take on Diana sounded kinda cool.
It was well written, well acted with great direction and cinematography.
The Huntress is back to being the daughter of Batman and Catwoman as Rao intended.
I liked the new version of Black Canary, and finally Oracle is in a universe where her remaining crippled makes sense. I still don’t like that particular idea, but it at least makes sense and the actual tragedy was handled far better in the WB’s Birds of Prey than the imaginary story Killing Joke.
Best of all the creators of the show took the concept seriously. Yeah, they had fun, and the premiere wasn’t without humor, but the show respected the medium.
The only thing I could have done without was Alfred’s narration in the opening. His words are redundant and less powerful when compared to Batgirl’s flashbacks.
Ray
The WB will likely repeat the opening as they’ve done with Smallville so many times. So, you’ll still have a chance to catch it.
I got a cystal-clear copy, and it was still unwatchable.
What a mess.
Disjointed, moronic motivation and characterization, music obscuring the dialogue, and wooden acting which I assume they thought no one would notice due to the copious T&A.
You didn’t miss much.
I, for one, have better things to do of an evening than waste an hour or so watching those involved try to renovate this white elephant.
Right from the getgo, the internal logic was flawed. The noise of the gears and workings of the tower clock would deafen anyone in the room, not to mention having a super sceret hideaway with a gigantic window (it appeared frosted at the top of the show, but was clearly not so during the balcony scene at the end) through which anyone in any of the surrounding office towers could look.
To paraphrase Chester A. Riley: “What a re-moltin’ development!”
Oh, one more thing.
Dollars to doughnuts that this show will very quickly devolve into ‘Dial M for Metahuman’ villain of the week.
Last comment, but have to get it out of my system.
The rationale for the missing Batman:
Batman/Bruce Wayne, whose raison d’etre is obsession, and who is intertwined with the real estate of Gotham City more tightly then is Dracula with the soil of Transylvania, just ‘gave up’ and left?
Yeah, right.