Point Pleasant launched last night, a tale of a cute half-breed devil gal who washes up on the shores of the titular New Jersey town (although it’s obviously filmed in California, as the ocean shows up on the left side of the screen while on the east coast, it would be on the right side of the screen). Marti Noxon, the second or third most key person on Buffy, shows up… and shows that as much as she may have learned from working with Joss Whedon, she should have been studying some Stephen King.
Y’see, King knows something about writing horror stories that keep you interested. Read Christine or Cujo and you’ll see a little taste of the horror to come early on — and then the next half off the book is all just character stuff. Get you to care about the people, and then it really matters when they’re in jeopardy.
Instead, cute semidevil gal is shown to generate problems for herself and the surrounding folks, a mixture of the uninteresting and the unlikable. At the end of the first episode, I don’t care what happens to any of these folks, neither the teens (who generally don’t look like teens) nor the few adults that exist to provide a frame for the teens.
This show could use Allyson Hannigan. See her do her shy girl act for 15 seconds and you care about her. Allyson, however, is slated to start showing up on Veronica Mars, a show which continues to be brilliant on a level I can’t quite define. (I can tell you one sign of the genius: that Veronica is not coming from a place of moral purity. In a series with this layer of darkness, it would have been wrong for her to have always stood against the snooty rich. Instead, it is clear that she was quite happy to run with them before she fell from grace, a fall which was not caused by her own choice of actions.)
