The eighty-ninth TV show: #492 Cadfael
Before we picked this series, we were talking about the need to do a crime show. A monk in the 12th century investigating crimes felt like a good twist on it - and as I loved Umberto Eco's In the Name of the Rose (the book - apparently the movie doesn't hold up), it felt like a good pick. Sadly, it turned out that wasn't quite right. While the dialogue was good in places, the world is interesting and the regulars are amazing, the writing doesn't live up to it. Perhaps it's because all of these were based on books, but they drag - not in old show dragging, where it's not as tightly edited, but lots of filler dragging where the characters and world are meant to build on, but it doesn't actually manage to do so. Instead, it just plots - some definite third act problems, and it's hard to not feel like this would have been better as a standard hour rather than the feature length these episodes are. They turned it into a boring series, where the good parts don't outweight the bad.