Vampires, and Werewolves, and Ghosts - Oh, My!

 

by Pa Rock

Television Junkie

As I sit typing at my living room window before daylight on a Monday morning, watching last night's full moon slowly descend toward the horizon, I am put in mind of a old British television show that I have recently begun streaming.  

Being Human ran for five seasons from 2008 until 2013 and had a total of  37 one-hour episodes.  It was classified by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) as a comedy/drama and was of such a good quality that American producers promptly stole the concept and came up with a version of the same name on this side of the pond.

(Many hit American television series had their roots in British television.  Shameless, The Office, and Queer as Folk are three examples.)

Though I have not seen any episodes of the American series, the plot lines appear to be identical.  In both versions a vampire and his friend, a werewolf, decide to rent an apartment in an attempt to become more like ordinary humans, but after moving into their new shared quarters they find that their living space is already occupied by the ghost of a previous tenant.  And while that sounds fairly hokey, or at least like the set-up for a dumb joke, it actually works quite well as a plot device, at least in the British version of the series.

The British version has George, a young man who had been non-fatally injured by a werewolf several months earlier and then developed into one himself, being befriended by Mitchell, a workmate at a hospital in Bristol, who was "turned" following an attack by a vampire a hundred years earlier during World War I.  The two men form a bond of friendship and decide to find a flat together where they can work at controlling the urges that continually pull them toward the dark side.  As they are moving into their new digs, they encounter Annie, the ghost of a young woman who was a previous tenant of the same apartment and who died there when she accidentally (?) fell down the stairs.

None of the young actors in the lead roles are household names, but they all should be.  (I did recently see Russell Tovey, the actor who portrays the werewolf, George, in the initial episode of John LeCarre's "The Night Manager," on Prime.)    Mitchell, the vampire, is played Aidan Turner, and Lenora Crichlow is Annie, the ghost.  The acting is first-rate and the principal players use their talents to make a fantastical situation into a tense, exciting, and very believable drama.  Tovey's werewolf, George, in particular, is very angst-riddled and often confused about what he expects from humanity, and his passionate pronouncements do much to create and sustain the show's believability. 

There is a great deal of violence featured in this series, as should be expected with tales involving a hungry vampire, a wolf-human who loses total control each time a full moon crosses the night sky, which is at least once per episode  - and who has trouble keeping his clothes on, and a confused and often angry ghost.    So Being Human may not be a show that the entire family would be comfortable watching together, but it is one that discerning viewers should check out and would likely enjoy - especially if their tastes run toward vampires, and werewolves, and ghosts.

Oh, my!