2 out of 5

Created by: Johnny Caps, Julian Murphy, Howard Overman

Man.  So at some point in 2012/2013, I switched over from being a movie pig to being a TV whore.  I suspect I’m not alone, with the advent of streaming or other, er, easily accessible ways of gathering viewing material fairly instantly, and the non-compressed storytelling that television lends itself to allowing for easier multitasking, as you can turn away for parts of episode X and generally fill in the blanks by the time of episode Y.  With whatever media with which I’ve gotten obsessed – music, movies, comics, books – as we are all ought to do, I’d developed a fairly good sense of what I’m in to or not.  Yeah, it’s tough to put a book down once you’ve started it (or it is for me), but I can generally suss out within a few pages if I should be investing me time or not.  Movies I have a fairly open palette, though I’ve found I can generally rely on instinct: if I notice that I’ve frozen in my tracks to watch what’s on the screen, chances are it’s a good flick, or at least one I’ll mostly enjoy.  The comic format is most similar to television in that it relies on the junk food experience of piecemeal treats, as well as the “one more issue” syndrome.  It’s taken me years to get comics down to an affordable system of scanning books on the rack and rotating titles in and out when it’s time to let them go.  But I’m sorta just starting with TV.  Especially with the speedball way in which we view it, now.  When you have a whole season of something at your fingertips, it’s easy enough to just power through it.  But if you’re watching something while it’s on the air, when do you let go?  And yes, countless blogs and editorials have been written on the subject, with billions of internettles offering their developed rules.  But each must arrive at a method on their own, of course.

I would think many people came to Atlantis following one of the creators.  Caps and Murphy worked on Merlin, so you certainly have the fantasy setting to match that experience, and Overman caught my heart with Dirk Gently and then fed it drugs with the first couple seasons of Misfits before maybe stomping on it with seasons 4 and 5 (admittedly enjoyable but nothing like the start of the show…).  But it was enough to convince me to watch ‘Atlantis,’ and his cheeky sense of humor and wayward plotting occasionally rears its head.

Otherwise, though, it’s pretty shite.  I’ll go ahead and say that I’m allotting it extra stars almost exclusively for the main cast of Jack Donnelly as Jason, Mark Addy as Hercules, and Robert Emms as Pythagoras, because their camaraderie and friendly faces – god damn them – made me want to keep watching.  It was an odd experience, ’cause I couldn’t have give half a tink about the overall story – a really poorly developed mishmash of mythology and relying on an Oracle foretelling of fateful vagueness in order to force non-existent tension into the going-ons – but Addy would joke, Donnelly would smile, Emms would bumble, and I’d hang in there.  And while the “fated” path of Jason vs. Atlantis’ king and queen (the supposed focus of the season) might’ve fallen flat, the first half of the series would occasionally drop cute mythology in there, and you kept hoping they’d do that some more.  Something like Fables, where the references just keep piling up until you’re fifty issues deep and realize that the kitsch has replaced real plotting but oh well.  Since the cuteness comes and goes, the lack of anything else is all too apparent.  And it was like that from the start.  From the first, horribly directed first episode with really odd slow motion moments and poor CGI.  This was a show demanding big sets and effects that it could never afford; that would be fine if the thing played more for camp, but it wanted to be dreadfully serious at points.

Oh, also, did I mention (I didn’t, I know this, and so now I’m guilty of trite phrasing and should be damned) that Jason is from the present?  Yeah.  He’s on a ‘quest’ to find his father or something and takes a submersible, sees a bright light, and wakes up in Atlantis.  Cool, okay!  Let’s not mention that ever again, except to give Jason a way of recognizing names like Hercules and Medusa, because then it makes writing jokes about that stuff easier.  Yes, the season ender suggests why the whole present day / Atlantis timeline thing might’ve happened, but it was so relentlessly unused everywhere else that it rates as pure fluff.

Sigh.  The sad thing is that I’ll probably tune in again.  I’ve been able to drop shows where I just don’t care… because I generally don’t like any of the characters.  Going for the comic book comparison, I suppose this is like buying every Wolverine appearance or something.  You just like the character, even when the book is The Crap.  Jason, Hercules and Pythy aren’t, by any means, the greatest television trio, but thinking over what I’m watching, I don’t have a little band of brothers whose chemistry I enjoy.  So apparently that’s worthwhile.  But if you’re going into this thing expecting a good story… insert joke about fated for disappointment HA YES so funny.