Gracie Blogging; Halloween Week!

By Gracie

Hello and a howdy everybody! Happy week of Halloween! In honor of my favorite holiday, we’re gonna look at some of my favorite Halloween or spooky related specials and movies every day this week!

Today we start this off with a new special that aired this past week on NBC. Mockingbird Lane.

If you recall, last week I wrote about how Mockingbird Lane was supposed to be a reboot of the old Munsters show done by Bryan Fuller, who is a God to me because of Pushing Daisies. It was supposed to be a show and NBC had faith in it…till about 3 weeks ago. Because they put so much money in this they had no choice than to air the thing and try to make a profit.

So, how was it? Was NBC right to trash it?

I watched the show with my mother, who, while I love her very much, has different taste than me. She’s not one for blood and gore and wouldn’t really give Pushing Daisies a chance due to the nature of the show. We watched Mockingbird Lane together and….

She didn’t like it.

But me on the other hand, I loved this show. It’s not perfect, but I think it’s an understandable shame that we won’t see these characters (literally) fleshed out.

Eddie Izzard as Grandpa is the reason to watch this show. He is diabolical and disgusting and a pure delight. He’s loving this role and I’m loving watching him. But the bat costume needs work…

The others are good in their roles, but it feels like they’re competing with Izzard.

And I know a lot of people have been wary of the new Herman, the fact he doesn’t look like Frankenstein was turning people off, and I do have to say, he’s good. I don’t know if its fair to judge this cause you know there is more to this we won’t see due to NBC not picking this up.

But you can definitely see how the budget was spent with this. This show and the makeup are beautiful. I loved the scene with the spiders weaving Lily’s dress (hell I want her entire wardrobe) and it has the Bryan Fuller sunshine macabre I love so much from him.

Does this show compete with the original? Well sure they don’t look much like the originals (Marilyn aside) but I don’t think they wanted them to. I’d imagine there would have been more throwbacks; the most I (an occasional Munsters viewer in my youth) caught was how the music basically Frankenstein-ed the original theme into scenes you caught it with the thunder and lightening scene and just a twinge near the end.

Would this show have fit in with the rest of NBC’s shows? Well I can see them putting this with Grimm. But no-one ever thought Grimm was gonna succeed, it was almost a fluke that fairy tale shows did well last season. Would Mockingbird Lane had followed that luck, fluke, whatever you call it? Well knowing Bryan Fuller’s track record…probably not.

But I do like to add that the Nielsen numbers were actually decent for the show. It scored a decent 5.4million on the Nielsen Scale and even helped boost the ratings of Grimm. Could this mean it could be picked up for next summer/fall? I honestly don’t know. Pilots tend to gather more eyes and this one had such a history behind it I can see more than enough curious eyes turning in. But would that audience have stuck, again hard to tell…especially since fans would have to wait for a year for it to come back. What mostly killed Pushing Daisies was the long Hiatus that happened between season 1 and 2 because of the damned writer’s strike, Mockingbird Lane could have the same fate because of a long hiatus between episode 1 and 2.

Well if being a Pushing Daisies fan has taught me anything other than sunshine and joy it’s this; at least be glad you got what you got. Now in this case what we got wasn’t perfect, but it did want me hungry (yes pun intended…shut up) for more.

….maybe we’ll get a comic?