Kindred: The Embraced

Kindred: The Embraced is a cool vampire show! It has heart and determination that all vampires are not bad! Vampires are kind of human in a way? We have wars among ourselves and just like people we have our problems! This show is like real life. That is why I love the shows! It's real to a point that you don't have to take it too serious. Just watch the shows and you know what I mean. What great acting by Mark Frankel and C. Thomas Howell. The whole cast works great together and keep up a great story line! It grabbed me from the start! It's sexy and sassy in ways that I have not seen vampires before! Just watch it. It on DVD and I recommend this show very highly! Out of 4 stars I give it 4! The show it non stop awesome!

This show portrays five clans of "Kindred"--vampires--living in San Francisco. Unlike most other vampire shows, however, the vampires are not seen as evil or unnatural. Julian Luna, the vampire prince, demonstrates the epic nobility of a King Arthur. The premier episode is unfortunately the low point of the series; if it wasn't so easy to get lost, I'd recommend skipping over it entirely and starting with the episode "Prince of the City." This is very much a love-it-or-hate-it kind of show; it's very loosely based on the role playing game Vampire: The Masquerade, and many players hate it for being so different from that game, but if you can watch it without expectations from Vampire (and without giving up after hearing some of the hideous dialogue in the premier episode), you'll find it one of the most compelling shows ever.

I am not a big fan of vampire stories but I really enjoyed The Kindred and it showed the clashes with the different vampire clans. I thought it had interesting stories and not just a lot of fangs. C Thomas Howell investigates unusual happenings not knowing that there are vampires.

You even liked some of the vampires! It had a lot of atmosphere and I was disappointed when it was cancelled. I would recommend it!

This show could've been cool if they would've stayed closer to the true World of Darkness atmosphere. Vampire: the Masquerade (which is what this is based on) is one of the darkest, most well thought out worlds on paper. FOX destroyed it! They basically said: Lets make Melrose Place, but with fangs! We'll offer Mark Rein*Hagan a lot of money to sign off on it and it will be really cool! Well, it wasn't. It could've been the next X-Files if they really would've done their homework. But...they didn't. So now we have another cheesy, half baked show about Vampires. I'm glad they cancelled it. Maybe they realized that they were ruining something really good.

OK, maybe C. Thomas Howell is a little melodramatic, but this series was a good and (generally) well-acted modern vampire tale. I wasn't watching television, I guess, when it originally aired. But I rented it a couple of years ago and enjoyed it so much that I bought it on DVD a short time ago. The set has two DVDs and is in 5.1--pretty stripped down in terms of extras (i.e., there aren't any). Still, it's worth a look. Mark Frankel and Patrick Bauchau are excellent in their roles.