The Strain

I wasn't blown away by the pilot but it wasn't horrible.

I'll prolly just wait until the season is over and blitz through it.

Pilots for closely scripted serial shows rarely hook you in nowadays. These aren't episodic self-contained shows, the pilot has to fit into a broader season-wide 3-act structure. It's actually pretty promising that the pilot was as engaging as it was considering that most serial cable dramas are written to take 3/4 episodes to establish itself. But then, I never read the book.

That said, I actually kinda liked that Pete Russo was being cuckolded by a wine-sipping Sears hipster. If we have to put up with an obnoxious Skyleresque milf at least we'll have a solid reason to hate her.

U fgt.

I think one of the biggest sins with these types of shows is the professional scientist who should otherwise be intelligent doing ridiculously stupid things just to further the plot (see: Helix). I don't think The Strain was necessarily guilty of this (save the medical examiner deciding to pick up the beating heart), but I don't think they did a great job working around it either. It's like the writers are aware of this trope and want to avoid it, so they just throw in a couple lines of dialogue to justify what's happening. It has this forced sort of nonchalance that made some of the scenes and the characters feel really artificial and contrived.

Take them opening the coffin (I called it a coffin!): This would normally be a scene where you're asking how the scientist could be so reckless to do something like that, but we get Samwise throwing in a line about how they did a bunch of scans and nothing showed up. It really doesn't change that they're doing something stupid (they've never seen a virus like this before and assume their tests will detect it?), but just hand-waves it away. And then their reactions to seeing it full of dirt had this unexpected air of indifference. Looking at the security footage was similar to this: They act like seeing the coffin lifted off the ground in a fraction of a second is something that happens everyday, and then immediately jump to exclaiming that that massive coffin that was moved several feet in that short timemuststill be in the airport, because why wouldn't it be?

Perhaps I'm nitpicking and over-analyzing here, but it almost pushes things in the other direction where their actions become even less realistic. Rather than them acting stupid and accepting that these are stupid people, we get the reminder that these are professionals who know what they're doing - which makes it even more glaring when they step outside of that and act ridiculous or have such subdued reactions to what's going on around them. At this point, the people feel fake. It's not enough to put me off the show since I know most shows have a rocky first episode, but the writing and directing were sloppy in a way that doesn't leave me optimistic.

Peter Russo definitely does better acting bald than with glue hair ! On a more serious note, I didn't like most scenes, probably because it's a pilot and some scenes probably got axed, which makes them kind of cheesy. Like going full federal quarantine on some plane but unloading a mysterious 7ft tall wood coffin is okay enough ? Also that badass vampire couldn't just wait for CDC people and infect them in the plane ? I don't know, most of the scenes look silly. Maybe they'll get their stuff straight on the next episodes.

Second episode was much the same as the first episode I guess.... I really had to fast forward through the AA meeting part, that was the most awkward, boring, and badly acted section of TV I've watched in I don't know how long.

For such a great premise and producer, how did they manage to collect such a useless ensemble of actors? Some of the "emotional" scenes are so poorly acted I find myself guffawing/chortling constantly.

and oh boy! I justcan't waitfor that custody hearing to take up half an episode!

Agree, hopefully they can squeeze in another therapy session before hand

I'm anxious to see how the new game room comes out.

The script was questionable this last episode. "I can't take ten minutes to see my son right now, busy fightin virus. But I can block out a few hours to go cry at an AA meeting."

But hey, nosferatu and Kevin Durand. Gotta watch.