L'île de l'étrange

I was excited to hear that the WB was airing this new, creative series created by Kevin Williamson, and I have seen the majority of the episodes and I am absolutely hooked on this show, it's incredible! The setting is a small island town called Glory and the main character is a writer named Mike who along with the town sheriff, Rudy, and the medical examiner, Ellie, attempts to solve eerie mysteries dealing with murders, kidnappings, supernatural occurrences and other strange events which plague the town. This show is scary, fun and I really like the characters because there is always something interesting going on between them. I am hoping this show gets picked up again because only about 10 episodes have aired, as some sort of mid-season replacement I guess, and I have not heard whether or not it is being picked up again. Hopefully it will be, this is a promising new show that is very enjoyable and fun to watch every week, I know I always look forward to new episodes.

This show was truly an accomplishment for the WB, giving a nice break from their sap-dripping teen shows that only Gilmore Girls and Smallville have seemed to accomplish otherwise. The dry humor was wonderful and refreshing, and the romantic tension between Mike and Ellie was fun and edgy, avoiding what many other shows do not - jumping into it too fast, leaving no room for anticipation or appropriate development. Also, the weekly obstacles created not only something to look forward to, but something that truly held one's interest for the entire hour. The characters were great in each aspect, often going outside the lines while not being outrageous, just delightfully quirky. Unfortunately, as the WB often does, this show was canceled due to "poor ratings" in nearly impossible and illogical timeslots, being a midseason replacement for the popular Angel and jumping between airing after 7th Heaven and Dawson's Creek, who's audiences would not likely be interested in this show, of a very different genre, in that place. Well, we can always hope for a video release.

The premise of "Glory Days," an actual suspense- thriller television show, was one that I'm sure filled many people with hope and interest. What they've seen, over the past three weeks, has probably crushed those hopes fairly effectively....

In the first episode, we are given several creepy elements; a seemingly random murder, a mysterious letter, an entire town where we're told odd behavior is commonplace, with a population who strongly dislike the returning prodigal son (some of whom are his own family), and a disturbingly- designed board game, just to name a few. Any one of these elements, handled correctly, could carry a show for several episodes. "Glory Days" disposes of them all by the end of the very first episode, explaining away every element in precise detail, wrapping up every possible loose end.

This pattern, alas, was repeated with the second and third episodes as well. Each individual story sewn up nice and tight, with nothing left to gnaw at our minds or make us wonder at work the next day. Each episode ends exactly as it began, with only superficial changes to the characters lives, and no change at all to the world they live in.

Answering every question mere minutes after it's asked hardly builds suspense, and a mystery that's solved in less than an hour isn't much of a mystery. The most effective element of mystery and suspense, the part that gets people hooked, is not knowing, not having the answers. To paraphrase Neil Gaiman, people forget the stories, but they always remember the mysteries.

There are no mysteries on Glory Island. Simply put, instead of stepping into the shoes of "Twin Peaks" or "The X-Files," or possibly bringing something new to the small- screen, "Glory Days" is merely a hip, teen- oriented version of "Matlock" or "Murder She Wrote"

A shame, because the cast, and the audience, all deserve something better....

A smart and slick series from the creative man who brought us such wonderfully written thrillers as "Scream", Scream 2", "I Know What You Did Last Summer" and "The Faculty". Kevin has returned to the genre that has made him famous and he does it successfully with this excellent new series, a welcome departure from the same old thing we see on TV over and over again. "Glory Days" finds writer Mike Dolan returning home four years after writing a supposedly fictitious murder-mystery novel which was inspired by his own father's death. He hasn't written anything since so he decides to return home after receiving a creepy anonymous letter about his father. He finds that the citizens of Glory Island weren't big fans of his book, including his own family who think that his book degraded the memory of his father. The local sheriff is Mike's former childhood friend who Mike depicted as a repressed homosexual in the book. A waitress at the local diner didn't fare any better, Mike made her out to be his father's killer. Upon coming home Mike is witness to an accident on a ferry which he claims was murder. Because of his book everyone in Glory considers him to be untruthful and nobody believes him so it's up to him to uncover the truth with the help of a lovely young coroner, new to Glory she's the only one not spurned by Mike's book. Filled with Kevin's sharp humor and smart character development (the cast does a wonderful job of bringing these characters to life especially Frances Fisher as Mike's mother, who he pegged as bipolar in the novel) the series draws you in to the mystery of the island and you don't want to leave until it's over, even then you eagerly await what will happen in the next episode. Once again Kevin Williamson has taken an ageless genre and tweaked it with his familiar touch to give us and hour of great entertainment filled with suspense, comedy and drama.

After a moderately successful novel, Mike returns to the small town he grew up in only to find that the locals are unhappy with him using them as the "inspiration" for said book. He joins the newspaper there, and stays around... you know, I'm not entirely certain why. Because this did manage more than one 40-ish minute episode, I suppose? Yes, a whopping nine total, and seven of them were released on DVD(together with with three trailers, one for this, the other two for Asian Vision and Shaun of the Dead) edited into three feature-length combos(in an utterly random order, leading to something being solved early on, only to suddenly be an issue later) under the titles of DemonTown I, II and III. The relative lack of continuity actually makes them run awkwardly together... more than once, I mistook the opening sequence of one bit for part of the ending of the previous one. Anyway, the young male journalist of course has a penchant for figuring things out, and he aids the sheriff(his child-hood friend) Rudy and the coroner/obvious love interest Ellie(pre-Without A Trace Poppy Montgomery) in determining the truth behind the seemingly supernatural murders and abductions. They encounter vampires, decapitating clowns(!), possession by the devil and The Silence of The Lambs(hey, they make that reference, as well). The conflict is too often soap-opera-ish, the mystery comes off as Scooby-Doo level(albeit they do keep you guessing(after a while, it gets annoying with all the red herrings), and mostly holds up, if one or two explanations don't make sense), and the quirky characters just aren't that compelling(not to mention that they seem to change drastically on occasion, when the writers got a new idea; they are easily forgotten about). The acting is fine. This can be funny, but it tends to have a goofy tone, and it's pretty paint-by-numbers. I'd say this could have been better, it had potential, it simply didn't get around to realizing it. Would it have, had it gotten more time to try? Meh. Maybe. I don't think the viewers would have stuck around to find out(as a matter of fact, I suppose that is exactly what did happen... too many of us gave up on it, understandably enough). The dialog can be clever. I enjoyed seeing Emily VanCamp of Everwood(evidently she likes being the charming hottie in a little, forgotten village) fame. The production values are decent. Kevin Williamson swung and missed, with this one(maybe he got too much credit from us for Scream). This can be tense and scary, if ultimately it feels unsatisfying and doesn't leave any kind of lasting impression on you. If you ask me what this was in a few weeks, it may take me a while to recall. There is some bloody, gory, violent and disturbing content in this. I recommend this to fans of crime-dramedy, who the "lightness" of this appeals to. 6/10