Remember in Spider-man 3 when Peter says something like "I'm really happy" to Mary-Jane and then a meteorite falls from the sky? That was an obvious plot device. The subtext of that scene: "Hey, this status quo needs to be changed. I wonder if a plot device would fall from the sky."
With that said, Journeyman's take on the plot point and plot device makes Spider-man 3 look like a Tarkovsky or Godard masterpiece. If you turn your head for just a second, you'll miss the last seven plot points spouted by such characters as "Random Science Guy" that works with Dan at the newspaper or "Obituary Man," who, for some strange reason, appears for five minutes just to tell us about every person who ever died in San Francisco.
Then, there's the pacing of the show. In the second episode, Dan delivers a baby on a plane and his wife accepts his random sojourns through time. Can you say "Jumped the shark?" By the third episode, Dan's wife and fellow time-traveling ex-girlfriend both find out (and subsequently accept) the fact that Dan sees his ex in the past and is married to her best friend in the future. The wife/ex-girlfriend subplot should contain a perfectly good premise for character tension and drama. However, the writers of this show decided that any tension between characters should get summed up by the end of the page. More often than not, this requires one character to just say "I'm OK with you seeing your ex/time-traveling/missing work/marring my girlfriend/leaving me on the street." I guess I missed that lecture in Screen writing class, the one where I learned to remove all recurring drama by having totally honest characters whose arguments never last longer than a minute and end with everyone accepting the other person's reasons.
Journeyman is an uplifting experience. When watching it, one realizes that yes, they too can write for television because they'll put any re-envisioning of an 80s series on screen. It's also a great show because you don't need to follow it from the beginning; in fact, you can tune in for just a few minutes whenever you want because of the incessant recounting of past plot points. In case you missed my sarcasm, this show is awful. But, I'll keep watching it until they cancel it next week.
With that said, Journeyman's take on the plot point and plot device makes Spider-man 3 look like a Tarkovsky or Godard masterpiece. If you turn your head for just a second, you'll miss the last seven plot points spouted by such characters as "Random Science Guy" that works with Dan at the newspaper or "Obituary Man," who, for some strange reason, appears for five minutes just to tell us about every person who ever died in San Francisco.
Then, there's the pacing of the show. In the second episode, Dan delivers a baby on a plane and his wife accepts his random sojourns through time. Can you say "Jumped the shark?" By the third episode, Dan's wife and fellow time-traveling ex-girlfriend both find out (and subsequently accept) the fact that Dan sees his ex in the past and is married to her best friend in the future. The wife/ex-girlfriend subplot should contain a perfectly good premise for character tension and drama. However, the writers of this show decided that any tension between characters should get summed up by the end of the page. More often than not, this requires one character to just say "I'm OK with you seeing your ex/time-traveling/missing work/marring my girlfriend/leaving me on the street." I guess I missed that lecture in Screen writing class, the one where I learned to remove all recurring drama by having totally honest characters whose arguments never last longer than a minute and end with everyone accepting the other person's reasons.
Journeyman is an uplifting experience. When watching it, one realizes that yes, they too can write for television because they'll put any re-envisioning of an 80s series on screen. It's also a great show because you don't need to follow it from the beginning; in fact, you can tune in for just a few minutes whenever you want because of the incessant recounting of past plot points. In case you missed my sarcasm, this show is awful. But, I'll keep watching it until they cancel it next week.