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I binged it because I wanted to do something lazy while I was still dealing with the migraine. Also, completing tasks like watching a show rather than keeping track is easier sometimes? Makes brain relax to complete thing? Maybe it's just me.
The Midnight Club is the spooky season offering from Mike Flanagan. He's made some of my favorite Netflix shows and I usually find him at least absorbing. I was really looking forward to this.
To start with the good points:
* It has some great character moments near the end.
* Everything is tied up, which is rare in paranormal. Nothing was just spooky shit added to make it compelling, but would fall apart once people thought about it. That doesn't mean things are resolved, but nothing was gratuitous.
* I feel like if I rewatched the first episode I'd be all 'yup, this all tracks perfect'.
And the cons:
* A lot of the show and it's meaning relies on the Sk8er Boi principle. The boy and the girl who we don't even see interact much are clearly made for each other. At the end, they are together... awww... But they did the love at first sight thing and never really built up their relationship. So the whole thing is going to work better for a standard het audience that can project onto the characters. I still hold that the blank slates these relationships are is often intentional and works for people who are not me.
* There is an embedded anthology of spooky stories and the quality varies. In some ways this is great because the stories always turn out to reflect something about each kid in an interesting way. Two of the stories are really good. Some are... less good. There are two reasons I am listing this in the 'cons' section. One is that the stories take up a LOT of the screen time. Two is that since they are short stories by kids they are often underbaked and character motivations don't make sense... but that's okay because it's kids and the point is never the stories themselves. Having so much screentime being these stories to reveal a single character trait works brilliantly for Natsuki and a few others, but overall creates some serious drag.
* I have no sense of what the kid's daily life is like. Do they even see each other during the day? Sometimes, the story doesn't make sense if they'd had a single meal or yoga session or anything together in the meantime.
* The big one for me is holy hell these kids don't look sick most of the time. Having hot teens in crop tops was put over any sense of doom or fate. The kid with AIDS was sent to hospice while still healthy? Before he had a single KS lesion? Why the hell was he in hospice? AIDS moves slow with some people, even without modern treatments he might have been relatively healthy for another decade! Another kid who is ripped and healthy looking is all 'yeah, I'm near the end now' It's hard to take some of the themes seriously when they can always get up in the middle of the night, sometimes do midnight walks to the beach, etc. There is no sense that the fates are hot on their tails.
The one sign that the main character is sick was her hair, but they only have it short for a few episodes before she gets gifted a wig worth tens of thousands of dollars and looks herself again. They mention the 'struggle to still look like ourselves' but they are all in great clothes that they put on every day. No deciding to just stay in PJs.
It really undercuts most of the tension and themes. They have the kid with Leukemia be pale a few times, but other than that, you can't have a show about teens unless they are skinny, fit, clear skin, etc.
The Midnight Club is the spooky season offering from Mike Flanagan. He's made some of my favorite Netflix shows and I usually find him at least absorbing. I was really looking forward to this.
To start with the good points:
* It has some great character moments near the end.
* Everything is tied up, which is rare in paranormal. Nothing was just spooky shit added to make it compelling, but would fall apart once people thought about it. That doesn't mean things are resolved, but nothing was gratuitous.
* I feel like if I rewatched the first episode I'd be all 'yup, this all tracks perfect'.
And the cons:
* A lot of the show and it's meaning relies on the Sk8er Boi principle. The boy and the girl who we don't even see interact much are clearly made for each other. At the end, they are together... awww... But they did the love at first sight thing and never really built up their relationship. So the whole thing is going to work better for a standard het audience that can project onto the characters. I still hold that the blank slates these relationships are is often intentional and works for people who are not me.
* There is an embedded anthology of spooky stories and the quality varies. In some ways this is great because the stories always turn out to reflect something about each kid in an interesting way. Two of the stories are really good. Some are... less good. There are two reasons I am listing this in the 'cons' section. One is that the stories take up a LOT of the screen time. Two is that since they are short stories by kids they are often underbaked and character motivations don't make sense... but that's okay because it's kids and the point is never the stories themselves. Having so much screentime being these stories to reveal a single character trait works brilliantly for Natsuki and a few others, but overall creates some serious drag.
* I have no sense of what the kid's daily life is like. Do they even see each other during the day? Sometimes, the story doesn't make sense if they'd had a single meal or yoga session or anything together in the meantime.
* The big one for me is holy hell these kids don't look sick most of the time. Having hot teens in crop tops was put over any sense of doom or fate. The kid with AIDS was sent to hospice while still healthy? Before he had a single KS lesion? Why the hell was he in hospice? AIDS moves slow with some people, even without modern treatments he might have been relatively healthy for another decade! Another kid who is ripped and healthy looking is all 'yeah, I'm near the end now' It's hard to take some of the themes seriously when they can always get up in the middle of the night, sometimes do midnight walks to the beach, etc. There is no sense that the fates are hot on their tails.
The one sign that the main character is sick was her hair, but they only have it short for a few episodes before she gets gifted a wig worth tens of thousands of dollars and looks herself again. They mention the 'struggle to still look like ourselves' but they are all in great clothes that they put on every day. No deciding to just stay in PJs.
It really undercuts most of the tension and themes. They have the kid with Leukemia be pale a few times, but other than that, you can't have a show about teens unless they are skinny, fit, clear skin, etc.
