May 4, 1996 pg.14

The Couch Critic

Kindred: the Embraced
Fox, Wednesdays, 9 P.M./ET
By Jeff Jarvis.

I would’ve loved to hive been a fly on the wall—or, as a critic is more likely to be portrayed in Hollywood, a cockroach in the corner—when TV execs hatched Kindred. “Let’s make a `Godfather’ with fangs,” says one. What? “Think of it as vampires in Dallas.” Why? “Then why not a Transylvanian X-Files?” Oh, OK.

Thus was born a mob/soap/conspiracy vampires series that dumbfounds me. Maybe that’s because I never grasped the entertainment value of vampires. Are puncture wound hickeys really so sexy? But I could be wrong, for there’s certainly no shortage of retellings of the Vampire myth.

This one is a dark and oddly stiff story of clans of vampires who masquerade as normal folk running businesses in modern San Francisco. They are ruled and kept at peace by their prince, Julian Luna (Mark Frankel), a dapper don whose excuse for coming out mostly at night is that he likes the club scene. C. Thomas Howell plays a cop determined to catch Luna red-handed (or is that red-toothed?). But Howell doesn’t know his own partner is one of Them (we can tell because when they think vampirey thoughts they look as if they have cataracts). He also does not know that his nemesis, Luna, is actually his guardian, sworn to protect him as the dying with of a mutual girlfriend.

Sound complicated? That’s nothing. These poor actors are forever forced to explain who’s on first. A deputy tells Luna what he must already know about a clan: “The Brujah will force this war…. You hate them as much as I do, and you are strong.” Of they pick apart vampire morality in mock Talmudic debates: Jeff Kober (of China Beach) feels sorry for a dying boy, so he wants Luna to “embrace” the kid—suck his blood, turn him into a vampire, make him immortal, and thus save his life. But Luna decrees: “We never embrace children, no matter how merciful it might seem.” And I start wondering who’s right, silly me.

There are three reasons to make a vampire show: It can be funny, but Kindred has only a few gags (a cop investigating a man’s spontaneous combustion insists, like The X-Files’ Gillian Anderson, “There is a normal, everyday reason for this”). Or a vampire show can be sexy, and Kindred tries to score there but gets so caught up in its corporate politics, it turns into a turn-off. Or it can have something to say, and I thought that was where Kindred was headed fro the first scene, when a vampire was killed with a cross-shaped TV antenna plunged into the heart. (This comes soon after Fox’s Profit blamed a Killer’s psychosis n a childhood spent in front of a TV. What is the matter with TV these days? Is it listening to its own bad PR?)

I think Kindred was made just to be different. It comes from soap czar Aaron Spelling, and surely even he is tired of shows about sex and greed—bloodsucking as a mere metaphor. Here it is a way of life. But Kindred turns out to be just too weird and mean, filled with vampire drive-by shootings, rapes, murders, blood. Not my idea of entertainment.

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