A friend loaned me the miniseries from here! TV, "The Lair," yesterday, and my roomie and I watched the first three (of the total six) episodes last night. This show is really the TV equivalent of junk food, but it's a fun way to put your brain on hold. Each episode only lasts 25 minutes and the scripts are written like a vampire version of Mary Hartman! Mary Hartman! so it goes by fairly painlessly.
I was struck by a number of plot details and even some visual reminiscences that reminded me of DS. The show also seems to owe a debt to Forever Knight (another favorite show of mine). The only ref to Buffy tVS I could detect was the fact that one of the major vampires has a funny bleached-blond spikey hairdo but the guy is nowhere near as exciting as James Marsters' Spike.
For the record, in case it isn't glaringly obvious from the DVD art and promos, the show is aimed at a gay audience, and a lot of the strictly softcore sex is reminiscent of something directed by Chi Chi Larue, but there are very few instances of full frontal male nudity so far and the sex really isn't graphic enough to bother anyone who's reasonably open-minded in sexual matters.
Elements reminiscent of DS include the character of Damion, the leader of the vampire cult, who's brooding, conflicted, wears eyeliner, exudes an air of being powerful yet vulnerable, keeps a portrait of himself from the 18th century that he has to keep touching up because, like Quentin's portrait on DS, it changes to reflect the evil deeds his "curse" compels him to perform.
Then there's Frankie, who Damion always addresses as "Francis," who seems like Fred Olen Ray's take on the character of Willie. The actor who plays Frnakie actually does a pretty good job with it. There's a scene where Damion's hand is slowly reaching for Frankie's throat, and there's this ring with a very ornate bezel on the forefinger, that I found visuallly reminiscent of a shot in House of Dark Shadows.
Another element coming up in the latter episodes is that the character of the protagonist, a reporter named Tom, turns out to be the reincarnation of Damion's lost lover from the 18th century. The frame of the series is that Tom is being kept in a cell awaiting Damion's rising to come and claim him as his vampire consort--again, reminiscent of Maggie being kept in the basement cell in the 1967 storyline.
"The Lair" is probably too awkward and poorly-written to appeal to more than a very specific kind of audience, but I would be willing to bet that at least a few cousins on this board would have fun with it (I can imagine Penny Dreadful laughing her head off at some of the scenes).
G.
