{"id":8119,"date":"2020-08-06T13:42:42","date_gmt":"2020-08-06T13:42:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.offkorn.com\/blog\/?p=8119"},"modified":"2020-08-06T22:19:30","modified_gmt":"2020-08-06T22:19:30","slug":"witchblade-homeland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.offkorn.com\/blog\/witchblade-homeland\/","title":{"rendered":"WITCHBLADE & HOMELAND"},"content":{"rendered":"

The turn of the century TV adaptation of<\/a> the comicbook series Witchblade<\/a> begins with a movie<\/a>. Being almost entirely an action-drama (there’s some supernatural mystery in there as well), it suffers rather severely from the fact that the action scenes are mostly ridiculous. More than anything they bring to mind a super sentai<\/a> series… making it prohibitively difficult to take the drama seriously.<\/p>\n

Homeland<\/a> is also a TV series, one which thankfully doesn’t appear to suffer from unintentional comedy (just frontloaded gratuitous nudity). The first season is a combination of thriller and familial drama which comes across something like “Hex<\/a>: The Early Years”. On the face of things that shouldn’t have been much of a problem, but the early ‘fuck people’s privacy!’ theme is taken to Stalker<\/a>-ish extremes and almost ends up a deal-killer.<\/p>\n

The second season is a continuation of the first, following a timeskip, which slows things down with more of a focus on secret-agenty behavior and personal trauma. The third picks up shortly after and amps up the personal drama quite a bit. At this juncture the re-occurring psychiatric issues subplot (and accompanying mental institution committals) becomes actively aggravating. It also happens to be the point the series starts focusing a hell of a lot more on Saul than Carrie.<\/p>\n

Season 4 is something of a soft reboot which makes the odd choice to replace the adultery-related drama with childcare drama only to almost immediately drop the topic completely, while also going well<\/em> out of its way to shoehorn in more psychiatric issues. Seriously… what the fuck? And if that weren’t bad enough, the 5th season (picking up two years after S4’s conclusion) goes completely off the rails.<\/p>\n

It’s strange… the show makes so many odd choices and sends so many conflicting signals that it’s tough to get a read on it. The early seasons are both good and bad. Regardless, if you do decide to give it a chance, you should definitely stop watching at the end of S4 (if you can make it that far). Maybe go watch Jormungand<\/a> after for the Hex\/Bookman parallels.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The turn of the century TV adaptation of the comicbook series Witchblade begins with a movie. Being almost entirely an action-drama (there’s some supernatural mystery in there as well), it suffers rather severely from the fact that the action scenes are mostly ridiculous. More than anything they bring to mind a super sentai series… making it prohibitively difficult to take the drama seriously. Homeland is also a TV series, one which thankfully doesn’t appear to suffer from unintentional comedy (just frontloaded gratuitous nudity). The first season is a combination of thriller and familial drama which comes across something like “Hex: The Early Years”. On the face of things that shouldn’t have been much of a problem, but the early ‘fuck people’s privacy!’ theme is taken to Stalker-ish extremes and almost ends up a deal-killer. The second season is a continuation of the first, following a timeskip, which slows things down with more of a focus on secret-agenty behavior and personal trauma. The third picks up shortly after and amps up the personal drama quite a bit. At this juncture the re-occurring psychiatric issues subplot (and accompanying mental institution committals) becomes actively aggravating. It also happens to be the point the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[319],"tags":[172,174,176,192,240,64,412,411,95,30,243],"class_list":["post-8119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-tv-related","tag-action","tag-comic-adaptation","tag-drama","tag-movie","tag-mystery","tag-romance","tag-series","tag-televised","tag-thriller","tag-urban-fantasy","tag-workplace"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t