April 2, 1996, Tuesday
Pg. 8C, FINE-TUNING
SPELLING TURNS SOLID FOUNDATION OF ‘KINDRED’ INTO VAMPIRE TALE WITHOUT BITE
Julia Keller, Dispatch Television Critic
I have a message for Aaron Spelling:
Hands off my vampires.
Spelling, the producer who has cranked out more hours of television than anybody else, has stamped his name on projects involving teen-agers (Beverly Hills, 90210), models (Models Inc.), cruise-ship personnel (The Love Boat), innkeepers (Hotel) and detectives (Starsky and Hutch).
That’s just peachy: Spelling can make schlocky nonsense out of those professions, genres and demographic groups till the cows — and profits — come home.
With vampires, however, he is treading on the fighting side of me.
Kindred: The Embraced, premiering tonight on Fox, marks the producer’s first foray into a territory about which I care passionately.
Vampires are cool, elegant and enticing — as icons, not as neighbors.
From Dracula (the novel and multiple movies) to Dark Shadows, from The Hunger to Nick Knight (an obscure TV pilot starring Rick Springfield as a vampire detective), vampires have alternately fascinated and repulsed humanity.
Everybody from tweed-wearing scholars to 12-year-olds in T-shirts has tried to figure out why vampires haunt our collective imaginations.
Credit, perhaps, goes to the exotic touches of cannibalism and mysticism, the lure of eternal life, the narcissism of the night.
Vampires feed our obsession with the rich and beautiful — ever noticed that vampires are always wealthy and gorgeous, never poor and ugly? — and offer a sleek, omnivorous sexuality.
It was inevitable, then, that an enterprising producer again would seek to spin the most alluring of mordant mythologies into TV gold.
Why — oh, why — did he have to be Spelling?
Why not, say, David Lynch (Twin Peaks) or Michael Mann (Miami Vice)?
Unlike those producers, who are equipped with stunning visual vocabularies and an absolute disgust for the ordinary and expected, Spelling revels in the mundane. He thrills to the inane. He embraces the cliched.
Kindred: The Embraced thus wastes its wonderful premise — rival vampire clans in present-day San Francisco — on yet another of Spelling’s second-rate soap operas, burdened with bad dialogue and clumsy characterizations.
Mark Frankel plays Julian Luna, the handsome, conflicted head of the Ventrues — the No. 1 vampire family.
Luna’s control of the city’s clans (much like urban gangs, with infighting and bragging about muscles) is constantly threatened by other ambitious vampires — a scenario that may remind viewers of the Republican presidential race.
His most dangerous nemesis is Detective Frank Kohanek (C. Thomas Howell), who thinks Luna is just another mob boss who needs to be taken down a peg.
In the premiere, Kohanek and Luna clash when the detective courts a woman who happens to be a former flame of Luna’s — and a vampire to boot, unbeknownst to Kohanek.
In the second episode, reporter Caitlin Byrne (Kelly Rutherford) falls hard for Luna.
The other clans are called Nosferatu, Torreadors, Gangrels and Bujah, embodied by characters with names such as Daedalus and Lillie Langtry. (Bobs or Bills need not apply.)
By the way, kindred do not call themselves vampires” — a word coined by outsiders, as the show’s press kit explains.
Kindred: The Embraced might be terrific in other hands.
One imagines majestic halls down which swoop lonely, tormented vampires; eerie confrontations between veteran vampires and innocent newcomers; blood-red sunsets that melt into invigorating nights.
Instead, Spelling (and creator John Leekley) gives viewers silly preening by the macho undead.
Everything about the show looks phony — including the blood, which bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the stuff that squirts out of ketchup packets when somebody steps on them in a McDonald’s parking lot.
Why couldn’t Spelling have stuck with randy teens or dolled-up detectives? Why did he have to pick on our fang-toothed friends, our coffin-dwelling, blood-swilling buddies?
Spelling has plunged a stake through the heart of the vampire myth.
Only it’s not a stake; it’s a plastic knife.
