TV is the New Reading

‘Blood Ties’ worth a look, even in a crowded schedule

This year for my birthday, the government stole an hour from my day. I got a bit older, and I got a new vampire show to watch.

Lifetime premiered “Blood Ties” on Sunday. It stars no one and features nothing, but for all that it’s got some exciting visual effects and some reasonably solid acting and writing in it so with any luck at all, it’ll prove itself worthy of our time as viewers.

From what I could gather, Vicki Nelson, played by genre vet Christina Cox, is a former detective with the Metropolitan Toronto Police diagnosed with a deteriorating eye condition. She chose to leave the department rather than be sidelined and earned her private investigator’s license.

And she teams up with a vampire, Henry Fitzroy, who is something like 500 years old.

Vicki: See, I was gonna say you don’t look a day over 450.
Henry: Well, I moisturize.

Henry, played by Kyle Schmid, is as beautiful as you’d expect an undead, eternally youthful, blood-sucking thrall-thrower to be. It’s Vicki’s unnervingly glamorous ex-partner Mike Celluci, played by Dylan Neal, who seems a little too polished to entirely accept as a cop. But polished he is, so clearly he knows how to moisturize as well.

In the pilot episode, Henry reacts to a series of murders that threatens to raise a demonic force. His path crosses Vicki’s when a client of hers asks her to investigate the serial killings from a mystical perspective, rather than the police perspective. And when Vicki realizes the locations of the murders are describing a pentagram against a city map, she can predict the location for a fourth murder – at about the same time Henry does.

And Henry is ticked off that someone is raising this force because with 500 years of history gives him an understanding that people react badly to disruptive mystical forces – “villagers with torches and pitchforks,” he recounts.

Ultimately, there was a lot more background on all of these characters than maybe there should have been, but Lifetime gave them a two-hour pilot episode and a timeslot to run it in, so if there was more exposition to meet these new characters, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

It was a pretty good show as shows go — nice characters and strong enough dialog. The plot got a little buried underneath the exposition. But really, protagonist sensitive-artist-type vampires bedding gorgeous women and then vanishing into the night to fight evil, I’ll be honest with you, familar as it is, it makes for some hot television. Then the snipery between Vicki and Henry points to some excellent chemistry.

The show, based on characters and books by Tanya Huff, airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on Lifetime, and I do take issue with the scheduling.

There’s no space on the grid of course that viewers are completely ignoring, but FOX and ABC are already dug in head-to-head with solid programming Sunday and indeed, none of the networks is entirely conceding the night. Toss the strong entries from the Sci Fi network and the programming people at Lifetime must realize that it’s not their mother’s Sunday night. That is, “MISSING” may have been able to carve out a tiny but dedicated audience for itself several years ago, but that was ... several years ago.

That and it’s not terribly dissimilar to Sci Fi’s “The Dresden Files,” where a wizard is a private investigator and runs into vampires and werewolves and the like. And this NBC show “Raines” that premiered this week where the detective communicates with the dead directly.

One wonders how anyone solved crimes before ghosts and other mystical beings hopped in to help.

Anyway, I look forward to seeing it as long as it’s available, but am not holding out a lot of hope. It has a certain flash-in-the-pan quality to it and circumstances may simply choke it out.

But if the pilot episode is anything to go by, it seems to be worth a look.

Features Editor Terry J. Aman compiles the Best Bets for The Minot Daily News.

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