The Fades 1x01

This is the picture that I found when I googled The Fades



and it all by itself explains why I should enjoy the show. I guess my imaginary ideal work of fiction is something that's genre but not in a way that makes genre the main reason for its existence. I am a greedy person and I think in the ideal work of fiction, you would layer in genre on top of some good characters and feelings to raise the stakes and make all the emotions double emotional. And when a really good description or a really good shot is of a werewolf instead of a tree, it's three times as good. I'm possibly sort of a whore/the kind of person who puts ketchup on everything, but that's all right. I just want to have a lot of feelings and reblog gifs on tumblr.

I partly like this picture because it reminds me of Animorphs my first pop culture obsession, which embodies the ideal I'm talking about and is probably why I'm so crazy for it. But I mostly like it because it itself embodies the ideal. It's probably a promo picture for a genre show because if it was just about this kid going to school, why does he look so CRAZY and what is he doing in front of those birds and lightning, instead of just being in his room? On the other hand, you can't actually tell what the show is about. Birds? Hitting birds with lightning? It looks cool!

The Fades is actually only tangentially about birds; they keep falling dead to the ground in a way that is supposed to symbolize something I didn't pay enough attention to figure out. It's mainly about a sad/cute boy (is there any other kind) who wets the bed and can see zombie ghost things, and is friends with Posh Kenneth from Skins. That sentence sounds like my ideal TV show, so why was I semi-bored watching it?

Maybe there's something else intangible that my ideal TV show needs, or maybe I just need to give it time. Some stuff:

The Fades are zombie ghost things, like I said, or as the main character Paul is told, they're "shitty ghosts." For no particular reason they haven't ascended to the afterlife, and they wander around in the world and are intangible. Understandably this makes them "get shitty." After ghosts get shitty they start looking like the vampire from the Are You Afraid of the Dark? episode with the movie theater.



They've recently become able to touch people, which is scary.

I like the idea of having a monster that has really mundane reasons for being evil. And just like everyone else I like sad/cute boys who wet the bed and are friends/siblings with Skins alumni. Maybe I was just bored by all the scenes that Paul, Posh Kenneth, and Naomi Campbell weren't in, that also weren't scary. I think I might like the show better if we only saw and learned about things from Paul's perspective, instead of having to see scenes with other characters who I think are supposed to be fighting the Fades, or married to people who fight or used to fight the Fades, or something.

My conclusion is for a lot of the time when I was watching the first episode, I was pretty bored, but the end actually scared me a little and after ruminating on this show I've managed to convince myself all over again that I should enjoy it. So I will keep trying.

A cool moment, and what I hope the show will turn out to be like, was when Mac (Posh Kenneth/Daniel Kaluuya) was talking about The Sixth Sense while Paul was watching a dead lady. Even though Mac's fridge logic wasn't even good.