A Man. And His Blog.

2009 I was missing most of the good British pilots, 2010 I was missing most of the good British pilots, and I believe that it will happen again this year. And before it comes that way, I rather take some of the British pilots and watch them, just to see if the series is good enough for me. Like BEDLAM – a series nobody probably knows, since it airs on Sky Living (that’s the first time I’ve heard from this channel), a series every Ashley Madekwe fan should watch (like me, which is why I actually watched it to begin with), a series which should be forgotten soon again, because it was actually bad.

I don’t mind when a TV show is cheap as hell, and shows it in the episodes. But the problem is: You can’t make a thrilling horror series about ghosts, when the horror effects are everything but thrilling. The “ghost effects” weren’t working, the fast cuts weren’t working, even the water coming down the ceiling wasn’t working – it all looked silly and way too cheap for a genre shows like this, and I found myself facepalming the whole episode for those effects. For me as a horror fan, the episode wasn’t working at all. The only really good horror scene was the one with Kate (Charlotte Salt) in the bathtub, when she was pulled down, but other than that, the scenes were not only a ton full of stereotypes, but really not thrilling.

And I actually liked the basic arc of the show. The apartment block (obviously, there aren’t much tenants living there) having a past as a mental asylum is a nice way to tell some stand-alone ghost stories (and figuring the preview for the next episode, and the “cliffhanger”, it will be exactly that), and having teased something of a mythology behind Jed’s (Theo James) ghost hunts (the SMS he is always getting – from whom?) lets me hope for some character-based storytelling during the next couple of episodes. The only thing is: The characters were silly work in progress. I basically don’t know anything about them, except Ryan (Will Young) being in love with Kate and having lost his brother, and Jed seeing ghosts, which is why the first episode failed in delivering interesting characters. Moreover, the ghost mythology is kinda without rhyme or reason. Apparently only Jed can see them – so why not showing the ghosts in the mirror with the other characters, when they are actually looking into the mirror? Or how was it possible for Jed to drive in the ghost’s car, when the ghost was basically “not existing”? I know, it is just a genre show, but considering that only Jed sees them, the episode has delivered a bunch of plot holes already – which is so not good for a horror series with ghosts in them.

The actors did a solid job, considering the holey script. Theo James had some nice moments, when he was alone and thinking (dreaming) about ghosts, Will Young was lucky enough to have got the most out of this character for the first hour, and Charlotte Salt and Ashley Madekwe were good enough in her roles to be not just the beauty queens in a genre show. Sure, their characters are basically nothing so far, but the acting wasn’t all that bad.

Background information was missing, character depths was missing, better effects could have been good. Other than that, BEDLAM is a somewhat promising story, but the very small budget destroys the interesting plot. 5/10

This series is about ghosts, who don't know they are ghosts

This scene is about drowning in a bathtub