The Fading

So, a big thing at the moment is a new supernatural drama from the BBC, The Fades. It took me a while to get around to watching any of this, although British and supernatural, that same combination last produced Being Human, which bored me entirely.

And, to be honest, this series started out with a similar yawn inspiring pace. This is a problem British supernatural has, in that it now feels everything must be realistic, and to this end we must have scene upon scene of people interacting with each other about minutiae in their lives, and you forget there's any supernatural element at all! The first two episodes clock that nicely enough.

The conceit is that when people die (and this series skirts the issue of religion entirely, despite one of the characters being a priest) they either 'ascend' (which implies heaven/Christianity, because we can't offend that viewing demographic) or they stick around. And some of the ones that have stuck around are getting right ticked off about it, and decided that enough is enough, it's time to do something about it.

And so episode three eventually starts taking things in a new direction. However, by episode five, you'd be forgiven for thinking we'd skipped genres entirely! (I won't divulge more details in case you want to watch this series yourself.) This does keep it from being a retread of other supernatural cliches, however the new genre does raise some questions about its own internal realism...

This leaves episode six to come. I've seen the first five, one left, so I'll need to watch that. However... I'm not rating this as a 'much see' series. If you have it handy and feel like watching it, fine. However, if you skip it... you won't feel any emptiness inside...

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