What do you get when you mix Desperate Housewives, The Vampire Diaries, and The Stepford Wives? ABC’s new series The Gates. While it might seem like little more than an amalgamation of these three shows, the good far outweighs the bad, and this could turn into a fun little summer series.
The show follows a few families but mainly centers on the Monohan’s who have decided to move to the gated community after something that happened in Chicago. Nick (Frank Grillo), the father, is the town’s new police chief who rellocates to the gated community in search of a new lease on life. His wife, Sarah, hopes that this town will be a good place to raise her two children, Charlie and his sister (whose name I can’t recall).
Of course, as shown in the advertisement for this show, there is more than meets the eye with the town’s residents. Actually, The Gates makes a bold move by letting us in on the secret in the first scene when seemingly regular housewife Claire Radcliffe (Rhona Mitra) helps a man who almost ran over her daughter, tempts him into making out with her in the kitchen and the proceeds to bite him and drain his blood into the sink. When her husband, Dylan (Luke Mably) comes home he can instantly tell something is up, and after choke slamming her into the fridge and smelling her breath he finds the man in the wine cellar fridge.
Charlie and his sister attend the town school, which sends more kids to Ivy’s than any other institution (!). He immediately makes an impression by schooling everyone on Flannery O’Connor’s hidden messages about Lupus. Andie, a girl in his class, recruits him for the mock trial team and enlists his help in testing their booth’s lie detector test. It was nice to see in a show with monster’s that simple things such as high school crushes hadn’t been thrown to the wayside.
However this is a show about monsters and where there are vampires, werewolves are sure to follow. It turns out Andie is the girlfriend of football player, Brett, who also happens to be a werewolf coming into his own. He has trouble controlling his anger, tackling one of his teammates extremely hard and getting wolf eyes after said teammate made fun of him. He gets annoyed when Lukas, town bad boy and werewolf, mentions he should join the pack, but Lukas ends up stopping him from going all wolf and attacking Travis and Allie in the woods. Lukas is the character I see having the best chance of not being one note.
Among the other characters are two competing botanists, the affable the security team, and of course the town’s other residents.
The first episode manages to toe the line between compelling TV and absurdness. Viewers who enjoy vampire/werewolf tales shouldn’t have a problem suspending disbelief with this show, but I found myself rolling my eyes at times. Vampires are allowed to be out in the sun, by putting on copious amounts of lotion as Claire does in one scene? Not very compelling. The scene where Charlie walks in to a heavily vandalized bathroom only to see Brett walking out, with shirt half off and protective boyfriend attitude back on was laughable. Just as laughable was the strange gusto into which Nick jumped into going rogue and searching around the Radcliffe’s house. Wasn’t he just kicked off the detective squad for killing someone? I understand that someone was just reported missing but it would make sense for him not to leap in so fully. I do however think that his back story should be something the show delves into.
But there were many redeeming jewels: such as “the pack” riding bikes around the culdesac (I guffawed at this new spin on the town baddies) and the fact that Claire is having a hard time being a vamp, even wanting her husband to take blame for making her a vampire. All in all, this show has the potential to be a hit, or a tremendous dud. The show can be very pretty and the cast is gorgeous but in order to avoid being lost in the monster resurgence, the writers need to continue to bound the series in realism and deal with the personal relationships. Serving us the creepy and occult is great, but if the writing isn’t there this series will fade quickly.