September 30, 2007

TV: Moonlight (CBS, Friday 9/8)

"What's it like being a vampire?" "It sucks."

Yup, that's actually how Moonlight begins, and it never rises above that level of obviousness and laziness.

Mick St. John (Alex O'Laughlin) is a 90-year-old vampire, working as a private eye in Los Angeles. He's got a pretty blonde Internet-tabloid reporter sidekick (Sophia Myles, decorative but not much else); a 400-year-old vampire best pal (Jason Dohring); and a vicious killer vampire ex-wife (Shannyn Sossamon, whose presence in the cast of regulars tells us that she's not nearly as dead as we're supposed to think she is at the end of the pilot).

Los Angeles at night can be beautiful, but here it's murky and ugly; it's often hard to tell what's happening. The writing is tired, the acting isn't much better, and the only thing the show really has to offer are the physical charms of its actors (in the case of O'Laughlin, those charms are ample, indeed). An utter waste of an hour.

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