Sunday, July 17, 2011

For Your Delectation

Review:
Haven season 2 episode 1

[This contains spoilers; in that if it is possible to spoil anything in this TV series I will eat 14lbs of dog vomit]

I spent a quarter of last year watching a TV drama series that was so bad it was almost a comedy and I told you all about it. Haven was a 13-part series about the exploits of FBI agent Audrey Parker in a small fishing village/town called Haven, which happens to be cursed and have a deputy who can't feel anything except Audrey's touch.

My précis does it a multitude of favours. The reality is it's a series that is so badly put together it makes Crossroads seem like a HBO series paid for by Bill Gates. People actually asked me why I was watching something so remarkably bad and the only real answer I could give was because it resembled a car crash, in that as much as I wanted to look away, I couldn't. I decided that I was going to abandon it as soon as the first series ended. Oh and how bad was the finale? It was so bad that I spent best part of the 43 minutes it was on laughing at the complete and utter madness of it. I suggested that Haven is actually written by a slightly retarded 13-year-old with more money than guidance counsellors.

After 12 episodes and 42 minutes and 30 seconds of the finale, I was ready to kick Haven into touch and then it ended with a cliffhanger that I desperately wanted to see concluded I decided that I had to watch the season two opener. Which I have just done.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha hah! Please God, I want to know this more than anything else before I die. How the fuck did this even get to a pilot episode stage, let alone two series? Who has the creator slept with? Is the key demographic deaf, dumb and blind people? Is the writer a plumber? Can I have a job?

There are many holes in this episode; so many that you feel that Haven is actually the bottom of a colander. But the one thing that I noticed, quite without trying, was that scenes involving Audrey Parker (1) and Audrey Parker (2) were all filmed in the summer and all the other scenes were filmed in the winter. There were two ways of working this out; one was that the light was different, so different that between cuts it went from bright to dull, unashamedly. The other was that all scenes involving Audrey (2) had leaves on the trees and every scene without her it was in the middle of winter. In fact, it was like the episode had been made over a period of months. I'm even sure that Audrey (1)'s hair was different in scenes that involved a change of seasons.

At the end of the episode, nothing is resolved and a few more subplots are introduced that feel more like padding than polystyrene balls. I laughed. I laughed a lot. I shook my head; moaned and chortled, if such a thing is feasible and I vowed that I would stop watching it. Soon...

0.025 out of 10

1 comment:

  1. Never seen Haven and, thanks to your blog, never intend to. I have recently got quite into Warehouse 13, though, which is a sort of X-Files for stupid people.

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