2 out of 5

Created by: Guillermo del Toro, Chuck Hogan

covers season 1

I wasn’t a huge fan of what I read of the Strain books.  The second book upped the stakes substantially and was admittedly a page turner, but the world concocted by del Toro and Hogan wasn’t compelling enough to carry me through to the third book.  I can’t pinpoint what I was expecting from the series, but it didn’t come anywhere near the mark, and mainly for a vibe that was established in the first book: cliche.  A lot of the hype leading up to the books was regarding how ‘scientifically’ Toro and Hogan were planning on approaching the vampire genre and, yes, those aspects of the first installment satisfied.  But the cookie cutter characters and often hackneyed dialogue otherwise quite distilled the experience.  So: the first season of The Strain pretty much perfectly captures the tone of the first novel.  Which, yes, means all the bad: Corey Stroll as CDC Doc “Eph” Goodweather, David Bradley as aging vamp hunter Abe Setrakian, Jonathan Hyde as evil billionaire Eldritch Palmer, and Richard Sammel as head vamp’s second-in-command Eichhorst all utter the kind of forehead-slapping lines that you might want to forget have popped up in previous GdT works like Mimic and Blade 2… but unfortunately, whereas those flicks carried a bit of tongue in their cheek, Strain is dreadfully serious, which is one of the second, and main problems with the book (and thus television adaptation): its method of world-building is to take things very… very… slowly.  For every awesome reveal – a vampire autopsy, Eichorst’s ‘preparations’ – the show peels back for the weeks following, maybe to give us background on Setrakian, maybe to dial up Eph’s family drama, but always somehow presented in a droll manner.  The actors do well with the material (Stroll is effective at portraying a scientist’s attempts to understand vampirism as a plague, although Bradley’s Shatner-esque delivery is… questionable), it’s just that these problems stack: since it’s not paced well and its cliche, the world building can only feel like a distraction because we don’t care too much about it.  The effects are generally good as they’re kept practical (that autopsy is awesome), though the show doesn’t revel in the unseen as much as it should, leaving the main baddie looking for like a Dark Crystal alternate than something truly frightening.  As the season perfectly captured the imbalance of the first book, I will be returning in hopes that they do the same for the second.