They Do The Monster Math (Plus, adieu to The Good Place) - Friday Video Distractions, by Mike Norton

   Arriving on Netflix January 23rd was the ten-episode adaptation of Steve Niles and Damien Worm's October Faction.

     The series centers on the Allen family, who we learn have been in the monster-hunting business as members of the covert Presidio organization for several generations.
    Fred (J.C. MacKenzie) and Deloris (Tamara Taylor) Allen, an interracial couple, have been field agents for years. They've raised their fraternal twins, the introverted, artistic Viv (Aurora Burghart) and the extroverted Geoff (Gabriel Darku), in a variety of places around the globe, all under the cover profession of being risk assessors for an insurance firm. A sufficiently dull cover identity to keep their kids (and probably most people they meet -- who wants to talk up an insurance agent?) from wanting to find out more about it. The parents have hidden their true profession from their kids, even going the extra step of raising them as strict rationalists, eschewing suggestions of the paranormal in favor of more rational explanations.

    News that Fred's father, Samuel (Stephen McHattie) has died reaches him, setting in motion a need to return to his family's home for the first time in over 20 years. We learn, in steps, that Fred and his parents were not on good terms. 
   In flashbacks we discover that Fred's older brother, Seth, who had been the family's golden boy - seemingly beloved by all, and excelling in tests and training in the family's business - was killed, and died right before young Fred's eyes. We don't get the full circumstances for that until relatively late in this series.

    Deloris came from the same, small, upstate New York town as Fred. Her family was the only African-American one in this community, where her father was the sheriff. We learn that he, too, was killed by a monster, though he hadn't had the advantage of knowing they existed.
   The Allen family have been the wealthy landowners in this community, a position that engendered a mix of status and resentment, the latter due in part to how the elder Allens had increasingly kept their social distance from most in the town -- this for practical reasons of wanting to keep their often paramilitary operations, and anything to do with monster hunting, quiet -- which understandably was taken by most in town as their being haughty and aloof.
   Layers of intrigue follow, as long-held secrets threaten to reveal themselves, and eventually do.

   Social dynamics are aggressively in play, ranging from high school cliques and general  bullying, to the class distinctions and resentments in the town, to racial elements, a couple generations of children rebelling against parents, and hidden agendas and dire power struggles within the Presidio organization itself. Some elements of the teen social conflicts, petty piques and rebellion dragged for me, and even abraded a little, but as with all things your mileage may vary. You may have more of a taste for, or at least patience with, the 90210/Riverdale type interactions than I. Those were the elements that nudged me to take breaks along the way, rather than binge straight through. Even with the breaks, though, the full ten episodes fell handily in the first half of that debut weekend.
   More interesting to me is the eventual exploration of the psycho-social aspects of being a monster hunter, especially as these vampires, werewolves and warlocks are otherwise very human beings, with their own lives, loves, families, aspirations and interests. The compartmentalism and self-deception necessary to hunt these beings as a matter of course, judging them summarily on the basis of species, while continuing to see one's self as intrinsically good and humane, those are the most interesting themes underlying this sort of story, especially as the scales begin to fall from each of the characters' eyes.

   Sure, those themes aren't new - eventually hitting the issue of treating individuals as individuals, rather than simply sorting beings by race or species became plot topics in a variety of monster-hunting series, from Buffy and Angel, to Grimm and Supernatural. Still, I've approved of and enjoyed each of those challenges to the "the only good X is a dead X" orthodoxy, which always leads to a more interesting, diverse dynamic.

   By and large the performances are good.
   I'm generally terrible at pegging where (sometimes even if) I've seen an actor somewhere else before. Still, I only had a vague sense of having seen the actress portraying Deloris before, and was surprised to realize I'd seen her as often as I had, in the role of Dr. Camille Saroyan, the head of the Jefferson Institute's Forensic Division on the long-running Fox series Bones. I just didn't make the connection. (While not so acute as for me to self-diagnose with prosopagnosia, there are many, many instances where human faces are almost interchangeable for me.) Stephen McHattie, who plays the Allen family patriarch, has a long, broad list of credits from tv and film.
   Moving through the cast, I'm hard pressed to remember seeing such a completely Canadian cast in something that wasn't explicitly produced for Canadian television/cinema.
   If this ends up being all of the show to be made, it's a reasonably complete affair, though there's plenty of room left to explore with the characters, and the show does end with some other seeming menace beginning to show itself.  As of this writing there's been no word of an official renewal. Given that this first season was reportedly filmed between September and December of 2018, and so was technically in post-production for all of 2019, even if a second season is greenlit soon I wouldn't expect to see it any sooner than 2022.
  Before leaving for the week:      Last night saw the 2x normal length (3x, technically, though it ended with closing thoughts from the cast, in a live segment hosted by Seth Meyers) series finale for NBC's The Good Place, wrapping four highly-enjoyable seasons exploring the afterlife and possible mechanics of eternity. Who would have seriously wagered that so much time spent in pursuit of answers to questions of ethics, morality, and the meaning of life could be so entertaining? These final two episodes didn't disappoint. I'll miss them all, but it was an excellent , sweet way to conclude the series.
   Starring Kristen Bell, Ted Danson, William Jackson Harper, Jameela Jamil, D'Arcy Carden, and Manny Jacinto, each of whose characters endeared themselves to me from early on - sure, some more than others.
   If you haven't followed this series, I highly recommend it, with the express advice that you not watch it out of sequence, as each season ends with a revelation or game-changer, and you'll lose much by finding out secrets too soon.
   The first three seasons are currently available at least on Netflix, and all of season four should now be open to watch on NBC.com. It's been the only NBC show I've been watching regularly the past few years. I'll miss it, but I also think they let it properly run its course. Each season was 13 episodes, save for the last, which was 14, and all but the final episode (which I expect will be broken down into two episodes for syndication - if they go that route despite there only being 53 episodes) is in the half hour commercial tv format, and so only around 23 minutes each. 

   I'll likely rewatch the series between now and the end of the summer, in part because I'm not sure where it'll end up less than a year from now, with the continued rise of streaming services. Once whatever arrangements with Netflix and Hulu have run their contractual courses, I expect that this'll eventually be offered only through NBCUniversal's Peacock streaming service, set to go wide in mid-July. ::sigh:: Another argument in favor of buying DVD/BluRay box sets, perhaps?
    -Mike
Shows and movies hit on in previous posts:

 Sept. 20th: Mindhunter (Netflix)

     Sept. 27th: What's The Matter With Helen, The French Connection, and Frenzy. (Early '70s R-rated movies I saw with my mom)

     Oct. 3rd:    Preacher (AMC), Stumptown (ABC), Sunnyside (NBC), The Good Place (NBC), and Jack Ryan (Amazon Prime).

     Oct. 11th:  Joker (still in theaters), and In The Tall Grass (Netflix)

     Oct. 18th:  El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie (Netflix)

     Oct. 25th: Dolemite Is My Name (Netflix)

     Nov. 1st:   Watchmen (HBO series), The Kominsky Method (Netflix)

     Nov. 8th:   Seconds (1966 movie, currently available as part of Amazon Prime)
     Nov. 15th: Dr. Sleep (current theatrical release, but probably not for long), Horace and Pete (2016 web-produced series, currently on Hulu)
     Nov. 22nd: NOS4A2 (AMC, now on Hulu) and Man In The High Castle (Amazon Prime)

     Nov. 29th: The Irishman (Netflix), The Mandalorian and The World According To Jeff Goldblum (both on Disney+), light touches on Watchmen (HBO) and Ray Donovan (Showtime)
  Dec, 6th: The Booth At the End (Amazon Prime), and Us (HBO).

Dec 13th:  Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Amazon Prime), The Feed (Amazon Prime), 6 Underground (Netflix movie).

  Dec 20th:A Christmas Carol (FX), The Expanse (Amazon Prime), Killing Eve (BBC America)
  Dec 27th: Lost In Space season 2, and first impressions of The Witcher, both on Netflix.
  Jan. 3rd: Black Mirror (Netflix) and Phillip K. Dick's Electric Dreams (Amazon Prime). 
  Jan 10th: Undone (Amazon Prime), Witcher (Netflix) and Dracula (Netflix/BBC One). 
  Jan 17th: Kidding (Showtime) 
  Jan 24th: No shows, just some movie mentions as I recall some places that no longer exist.

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