With vampires well and truly done with this season, there's a lot of agencies looking for something new to help stand out from the crowd - some bright spark came up with the idea of 'cat-people' as a foil to the previously overused 'werewolf' option, and Nine Lives was born.
For scripted, obvious, plodding teenage pap, this isn't terribly bad. At least, not as terrible as Teen Wolf. From the get-go, every actor in this series has been handed a card with a one-line description of their role, and likely expected to work with it. Most of the actors aren't bad - they all more-or-less adequately fill their roles as Teen Girl With Super Powers, Funny Best Friend, Evil Bad Guy, Bitchy Mentor, etc. Grace Phipps keeps changing her role from Wacky to Bitchy to something else. Ben and Grey (almost as unfortunate a name as 'Skyler') are possibly the worst young actors I've come across, though. Grey can't act for the life of him, and for a 'love interest,' there absolutely nothing there. Ben, similarly, can't pull it off, and can't seem to settle on an accent.
The plot plods along with no definitive structure. There's an attempt at some overarching plot, and occasional tries for one-off plot insertions, but they conveniently forget things here and there. There's things mentioned and never touched on again, questions left unanswered, and answers left unquestioned - I can only assume that budgetary or time constraints meant that they had to add and remove stuff without cleaning it up so it made sense. Hell, even the point of the show - the girl with cat-like super-powers - is reduced early on to some basic super hearing, sight and empathy. Perhaps the budget for 'running and jumping' ran out?
All in all, I wouldn't be surprised if season one was the last season altogether. Silver lining? It's not as bad as Teen Wolf.
For scripted, obvious, plodding teenage pap, this isn't terribly bad. At least, not as terrible as Teen Wolf. From the get-go, every actor in this series has been handed a card with a one-line description of their role, and likely expected to work with it. Most of the actors aren't bad - they all more-or-less adequately fill their roles as Teen Girl With Super Powers, Funny Best Friend, Evil Bad Guy, Bitchy Mentor, etc. Grace Phipps keeps changing her role from Wacky to Bitchy to something else. Ben and Grey (almost as unfortunate a name as 'Skyler') are possibly the worst young actors I've come across, though. Grey can't act for the life of him, and for a 'love interest,' there absolutely nothing there. Ben, similarly, can't pull it off, and can't seem to settle on an accent.
The plot plods along with no definitive structure. There's an attempt at some overarching plot, and occasional tries for one-off plot insertions, but they conveniently forget things here and there. There's things mentioned and never touched on again, questions left unanswered, and answers left unquestioned - I can only assume that budgetary or time constraints meant that they had to add and remove stuff without cleaning it up so it made sense. Hell, even the point of the show - the girl with cat-like super-powers - is reduced early on to some basic super hearing, sight and empathy. Perhaps the budget for 'running and jumping' ran out?
All in all, I wouldn't be surprised if season one was the last season altogether. Silver lining? It's not as bad as Teen Wolf.