Every year I put together a brief summation of the television I enjoyed or alternatively didn't during the previous twelve months. My 2013 commentary is a little different, all confined to a single post and occasionally lacking the detail I've given previous round-ups. My television viewing has changed, though, along with my own aspirations as a writer. Anyway, television. No real spoilers this year.
Because it'd be all kinds of obvious if I were to trash everything Lazarus does, instead I'm going to be talking about what might have been, if the show had lived past its abridged first season. If anything, 666 Park Avenue at least ends with a final scene that proves to be the most interesting thing the show ever did -- a gothic, morally complex epilogue that leaves enough up in the air to distract your mind for a good half-hour post-show. That probably didn't read like a compliment, but I promise it is. There was always a darker underbelly to this series, as if a coiled, conniving dragon was struggling to get out and breathe fire all over the place, only for it to be buried under standards and practices and annoying network notes. Lazarus goes there, eventually, but it's all too little too late.
666 Park Avenue has suddenly become a hard show to write about. Due to circumstances outside of the writers' control, it's a series that, in its last gasps of life, greater resembles a mass info-dump than anything else. By rapidly speeding up what we can assume is the entire first season's worth of plot into just two or three hours, the show has sacrificed whatever threadbare characterization may have existed in the first place, leaving The Elysian Fields an episode in which people do things that don't make a ton of sense, while being told about other things by drab third parties.
If The Comfort of Death represented the speedy efficiency that cancellation brings, then Sins of the Fathers is where things start to get a little muddled. In an effort to bring things to a close in time for the series finale, it's not too surprising that the writers are forced to cut corners and make previously ambiguous characters turn specifically in one direction, but the stuff this week with Sasha struggled to make any logical sense. With Victor Shaw seemingly out of the picture, Sasha is adrift on her own quest, but it's a quest that is hard to define. Does she simply want revenge? If so, why pursue it through a third party priest? It's naturally confused as an episode.
Let's talk about pacing. 666 Park Avenue premiered in September a lightweight supernatural thriller with a pulpy, reasonably strong premise. But it quickly became one of those shows that never knew when to pursue or retreat from arc-driven storytelling, ABC presumably wanting a series that could play as a standalone anthology show as well as a serialized drama. Because that always works out. In the end, however, like so many of those hybrid shows, the standalone elements were primarily weak, while the major story arcs were dragged out to such an extent that it became easy to drift away from 666 itself.
I was once a huge fan of the horror genre. Especially when I was around 13-14, which I guess was pretty expected from an age/gender standpoint. But it's also a genre that I don't particularly enjoy anymore -- it takes a lot to genuinely rattle me, and most modern horror awkwardly fumbles into 'been there, seen that' territory. It's something I thought a lot about here, Hypnos heavily exploring the Drake as a plot construct and its violent history, a story that only ever felt derivative. It probably didn't help that the show cast Whoopi Goldberg in a role that merely cribbed off one of her most famous performances, but Jane's journey to the past got me wondering if 666 Park Avenue honestly ever had an interesting story to tell.
It's always fun spotting the moment when the writers sit up and realize they've gotten poop all over their hands. Just from what happened on the show this week, I'm assuming What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? was the first episode written within a month or so of the show airing, meaning the folks behind the scenes were able to see what elements were working and what elements needed to be pulled back or exaggerated. It was pretty clear all over, from the seemingly concrete proof of Gavin's real identity, to the restructuring of various character dynamics. Being 666 Park Avenue, none of it was that great, but it's clear the show is changing in one way or another, instead of merely phoning it in for this last run of episodes.
With every passing week, there are smaller snapshots of what this show could be. One scene in Downward Spiral specifically jumped out at me: an attractive montage of mutually concerned individuals getting dressed up for a Manhattan gala. Like the atmospheric, action-driven opera scene that opened up the pilot, there's a morbid slinkiness to these moments, something grand and gothic with its classical music score and array of disturbed protagonists looking all shady. If only the rest of 666 Park Avenue capitalized on it, though. This wasn't as strong as last week, but it's becoming clearer that the writers are getting a cleaner focus on what the show is going to represent, and how the fleshed-out backstory of the Drake will guide things. It's not there, yet... at all, but it feels every once in a while like it's on the right track.
There is a fantastic show buried deep inside of 666 Park Avenue. The series has so far been ruptured by a scattershot feeling throughout each additional episode, spooky events happening for no discernible reason, characters rarely interacting beyond surface level exchanges of dialogue, and subplots that have yet to grant us reason to care. Diabolic, the strongest episode so far, reined everybody in, so to speak. While characters are still stuck in their own smaller adventures, writer Christopher Hollier this week developed something resembling a through-line, one thing somewhat connected to the next thing, and so forth. Throwing in a bunch of revelations that actually lived up to the word also helped, and it seems like the show is trying to turn a corner.
Is 666 Park Avenue supposed to be campy? There were numerous moments this week in which I wondered if I had been looking at this show all wrong, and that I had been treating a campy horror soap like a dark soapy thriller all along. A Crowd of Demons isn't 'funny ha-ha' campy, of course, but campy in a "I can sort of see what they're trying to do here... if I reeeeally look for it" kind of way. Most of the dialogue is appalling ("That strange ritual was supposed to bring us incredible wealth", somebody actually says with a straight face this week), extreme tonal shifts occur at the drop of a hat, and plot devices drop like heavy anvils all over the place. It sure feels like a show intending to be campy. But while all of that would ordinarily result in a fun way to kill an hour on a Sunday night, 666 masterfully makes all this soapy awfulness actually pretty boring. It's some achievement.
The fourth episode of a new series should mark the moment in which things start coming together, the show hopefully having settled into a groove that forms a make-it or break-it relationship with the viewer. Narrative isn't actually as important here as you would imagine, since serialized dramas so often fluctuate between stories that work and stories that don't. What matters more than anything is for the show's characters to be engaging enough to capture your attention at home, that they somehow jump off the screen. It's easier said than done, as proven by 666 Park Avenue's strong cast trying valiantly to provoke interest, Hero Complex once again confirming that this is a show that's hard to explicitly care about.
Is the fact that stories are being built at all enough to say this was a pleasant hour? Regardless of none of said stories being particularly fascinating? 666 Park Avenue is in a difficult bind right now, the ratings tumbling with every passing week and a feeling brewing that the show isn't long for this world. So where do we at home go from here? Do we abandon ship before it inevitably sinks? Or just keep on watching, despite being fully aware that ABC will yank this in a couple of weeks? If you're doing the latter, then it's probably best to try and spot the goodness on offer. The Dead Don't Stay Dead was another episode with little universal success overall, but, unlike last week, there were actual bits of gold here and there.
A lot of stock is put in a pilot, primarily because it's supposed to be the very best depiction of a show's premise, something that inspires confidence at the network and within everybody watching at home. At the same time, a great pilot can grab an audience's attention so successfully that further viewing should be guaranteed. But it's also a little fraudulent: second episodes are far more indicative of where a series is going, and what we can expect week to week. With all that in mind, it's disappointing that 666 Park Avenue followed up its unoriginal but arguably fun pilot with something so... basic?
Do you remember being read fairytales as a kid and thinking that the leads were always kind of lame and uninteresting? And that the villains were so majestic and cool that you sort of wished you were spending time with them instead? Sleeping Beauty? Pfft. Gimme some Maleficent action! It's a similar feeling to 666 Park Avenue, ABC's spooky new horror series, where the villains not only steal the show, but are so head-and-shoulders above the rest of the cast in terms of mystery and entertainment value that you wish they had more to do. Which isn't to say this is a weak pilot, but says a lot about the burgeoning 'campy-slasher' sub-genre, where the helpless protagonists are shuffled around between the far more exciting bad guys, who chew the scenery like their lives depend on it.
