vote for more undercover-in-the-suburbs threesome AUs
Hmm. Time has passed, apparently? It's dark now, ugh.
I spent Halloween helping my friend who works in the comics industry hand out comics to trick-or-treaters. I think we gave out about 1200 comics in batches of five. That was fun! She lives in a neighborhood that's heavy on working-class renters and medical students, so quite a lot of the kids were having their first U.S. Halloween, which was adorable.
(They were pretty much all tie-ins to kids' TV shows. There are so few non-tie-in comics these days that you can happily hand to a ten-year-old whose parents you don't know. This is super-tragic.)
Then we watched a bunch of Muppets, I crashed at her place, and the next day I went to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
synecdochic's gathering and watched The Sentinel with a bunch of fanpeople. So now I can never again write Sentinel AUs without having ever seen canon. It's a milestone in my life.
...not that seeing canon made much difference. Canon really really doesn't have much in common with fanfic, wow. It's basically a 90s cop show with a much larger cars-blowing-up budget than writing budget. Once an episode or so they remember that they're supposed to have a gimmick about special powers and Det. Ellison finds a Clew that way, although the writing is generally bad enough that it doesn't actually matter that he finds the Clew.
Also Ellison is ... really obviously playing it gay. Let's see, I was there for the episode that had flashbacks to when he was undercover with the Vice Squad as a member of the Village People and had this super-intense relationship with Hot Older Mentor Dude that included sleeping with dude's girlfriend while they both wibbled about how much they loved him. And the episode where Ellison and Blair were each paired with a Fiery Latina Chick and Blair romanced his and Ellison attempted to avoid his at all costs. And the one where they hung out at a Catholic monastery and he bonded with the monks. And the one where they go undercover as a Normal Suburban Family, and by that of course I mean "Ellison and a female detective pretend to be married and Blair is the hot younger dude who inexplicably lives with them and everyone in the neighborhood assumes it's a threesome" because why not, show, why not.
I mean I'm aware those episodes were carefully curated (thanks, actual TS fans who were choosing them!) but I really did expect it to be more "Jim and Blair are super codependent with each other" and less "Jim is closeted and patient, Blair is 100% oblivious about p. much everything".
Anyway.
The writing was terrible, the casefiles were forgettable, the action scenes were missable. The others who were watching kept saying that the acting was also terrible but TBH is was not terrible to the extent that I noticed. I mean it wasn't amazing but, idk, it wasn't distractingly bad, they seemed to be doing the best that could be expected given the material they were working with. But then IDK, I have noticed that I tend to have a different opinion of what "bad acting" means than the standard. I would not be surprised if I just don't look for the same body language/tone cues that most people do.
I spent Halloween helping my friend who works in the comics industry hand out comics to trick-or-treaters. I think we gave out about 1200 comics in batches of five. That was fun! She lives in a neighborhood that's heavy on working-class renters and medical students, so quite a lot of the kids were having their first U.S. Halloween, which was adorable.
(They were pretty much all tie-ins to kids' TV shows. There are so few non-tie-in comics these days that you can happily hand to a ten-year-old whose parents you don't know. This is super-tragic.)
Then we watched a bunch of Muppets, I crashed at her place, and the next day I went to
synecdochic's gathering and watched The Sentinel with a bunch of fanpeople. So now I can never again write Sentinel AUs without having ever seen canon. It's a milestone in my life....not that seeing canon made much difference. Canon really really doesn't have much in common with fanfic, wow. It's basically a 90s cop show with a much larger cars-blowing-up budget than writing budget. Once an episode or so they remember that they're supposed to have a gimmick about special powers and Det. Ellison finds a Clew that way, although the writing is generally bad enough that it doesn't actually matter that he finds the Clew.
Also Ellison is ... really obviously playing it gay. Let's see, I was there for the episode that had flashbacks to when he was undercover with the Vice Squad as a member of the Village People and had this super-intense relationship with Hot Older Mentor Dude that included sleeping with dude's girlfriend while they both wibbled about how much they loved him. And the episode where Ellison and Blair were each paired with a Fiery Latina Chick and Blair romanced his and Ellison attempted to avoid his at all costs. And the one where they hung out at a Catholic monastery and he bonded with the monks. And the one where they go undercover as a Normal Suburban Family, and by that of course I mean "Ellison and a female detective pretend to be married and Blair is the hot younger dude who inexplicably lives with them and everyone in the neighborhood assumes it's a threesome" because why not, show, why not.
I mean I'm aware those episodes were carefully curated (thanks, actual TS fans who were choosing them!) but I really did expect it to be more "Jim and Blair are super codependent with each other" and less "Jim is closeted and patient, Blair is 100% oblivious about p. much everything".
Anyway.
The writing was terrible, the casefiles were forgettable, the action scenes were missable. The others who were watching kept saying that the acting was also terrible but TBH is was not terrible to the extent that I noticed. I mean it wasn't amazing but, idk, it wasn't distractingly bad, they seemed to be doing the best that could be expected given the material they were working with. But then IDK, I have noticed that I tend to have a different opinion of what "bad acting" means than the standard. I would not be surprised if I just don't look for the same body language/tone cues that most people do.
no subject
As you say, the impression of the characterisation is pretty different between the two.
no subject
no subject
I'm also a huge gen fan for this show, for some reason. It's not that I can't see the slash, it's just that gen is more my thing for those two.
no subject
Though I actually haven't seen a ton of it; the college friend who got me into fandom was into buddy-cop shows, and that included The Sentinel, so we watched a bunch of s1 and some S2 and the Reichenbach Falls With Spirit Animals episodes, and that's about all I've seen. But I do remember s1 as an interesting show! An interesting show that 95% of the fandom was writing very very differently from what I'd been watching.
no subject
It really is so so slashy.
no subject
(I mean, it was certainly base-level slashy, all 90s action-show television is base-level slashy, but...Duncan and Methos and Mulder and Kycek and Daniel and Jack and Rays and Fraser and Xena and Gabrielle and I could go on were all WAY slashier than Jim and Blair.)
(Campy tho. TS definitely manages campy.)
no subject
And definitely it was campy. For sure.
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject