What the hell did I just watch: Birds of Pretty I mean Birds of Prey

I knew I’d seen the actress who played Oracle (and who I blame for sucking me into watching this damn travesty of a television show, curse it) before, so I checked Wikipedia, because that slightly off nose and those cheekbones were familiar.  Ayup.  Bats.  (Look, I went with a friend who adored cheesy horror and it had Lou Diamond Phillips–don’t judge, OK?  Also, it wasn’t that bad.  Now you can judge.)  Also, the Mentalist, where she was killed off.

So, as astute readers might know, I’ve got a bad leg, so I’m not the spry, handstand performing Vom of ages past (and yes, actually, my usual workouts did involve handstands, no joke).  Nowadays, I walk with a limp and sometimes use a cane, so a superhero who is stuck in a wheelchair appealed to me, especially if she was brilliant, lead a double-life, had a Greek inspired name, and kicked butt.  We all have our ids.

Now, I’d heard this show was pretty bad.  But lots of people hate comics TV on general principal and it garnered a lot of viewers before being inexplicably wiped off the air.  So I thought maybe it was just the usual insular bitching and moaning about continuity or whatever.

Ahahahaha.  No.

This show is truly, deeply, wretchedly bad. Which is a shame, because it had so much potential.

I’ll admit upfront that I only made it through the pilot.  Maybe things get drastically better, but I doubt it.

So, we begin with Alfred narrating a tale of Gotham and talking about Batman and Joker, which kind of annoyed me, because I am not watching this show to find out about Batman.  But anyway.  So Alfred says that Le Bat put away the Joker, but first, the Joker took his revenge by cruelly killing or maiming the ones Batman loved.  We watch Catwoman get stabbed while her daughter watches on (secret lovechild of the Bat and the Cat!) and then Batgirl get shot after a weirdly gratuitous shower scene (I don’t know, because this show was supposed to be for women, I thought) and then we see that a little blonde girl gets visions of all of this.

And OK, none of that sounds bad, actually.  It sounds like a comic made into TV, sure, but not bad.  It gets bad when we watch the young girl, now a teenager, meet a guy on the bus as she goes to Gotham city to make her fortune.  That’s when the cliches start–because he asks her if she’s running from or to and she ends up taking his number and I just rolled my eyes.  I don’t know who the hell writes this shit, but every girl I know is wary of strange guys on buses who sit down next to them and start chatting, cute or not.  I mean, lol whut.  It’s eventually revealed that the guy isn’t so nice afterall.  What a surprise.  I never saw that coming.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  So, the girl on the bus is the teenaged Dinah, and she’s looking for two women she’s seen in her mind but never met.

Meanwhile, we get to see Helena, Huntress, swank around in the most absurd outfit for crime fighting I have ever seen.  It’s like a bizarre combination of floaty fairy-wing and dominatrix, and it just does not work for me.  There’s a weird wide-neck nearly-disco collar but the fabric is gossamer and there’s pleather or something and just….

Huntress is beautiful and cranky and athletic and she’s kicking and fighting and beating up bad guys in dark alleys and yet somehow instead of being enthralled, I’m thinking, gosh, I bet that’s really uncomfortable to workout in.  I hope she’s wearing proper support.

….This is probably not the emotion that the producers were hoping for.

I know it’s cool and all, but my goodness, that would get jabby into uncomfortable places and how could she bend properly to do roundhouses? I kind of want to hand her a Title9 catalog and recommend she look into something made from breathable fabrics and maybe some better cushioned shoes.  Nikes, perhaps, or with all that leaping, maybe some Rykas.

If you think I’m overthinking things in an action show, it’s probably because the editing in this fiasco sucks.  There are long pauses between words.  There’s time for people to strike ridiculous poses and then just….stand there.  It’s kind of weird and sad and I wanted it to stop, because at the heart, there’s some interesting possibilities for storytelling.

The three women eventually come together in a loft with nifty gadgetry (although the head scanner looked a lot like a McGuyver’d cuisinart container, which made me giggle).  Anyway.  Three women, all from rough pasts, making a little family and happiness and fighting crime.

Which would be awesome, except there were all these plot holes.  The docks at Gotham city have been bought up and haven’t been used.  No one’s been there for years.  Dun dun dun.  Really?  No one’s been at the docks in a river-based city?  Really?

Huntress goes to visit a businessman wearing her dominatrix “work” getup.  She looks like a very weird, expensive hooker, but this is what she wears when fighting crime, I guess.  They’ve got goggles that mockup vision miles away but nobody’s thought of undercover business casual, I guess.

It’s just very puzzling.

The villain in the pilot is painfully obvious, and the way the three women battle him is just as obvious.  There’s a moment that should be touching and emotional, when in her mind, Batgirl/Oracle has legs in the villainous dreamworld and then gets crushed down to her new body with no working legs, but it just came off as flat and kind of embarrassing.

And in the bat-leather costume, Batgirl just looked kind of weird.  Not confident and awesome, but, dare I say it, silly.

Which is really the whole problem with this show.  In Star Trek, costume silliness is everywhere.  It’s as if 100% lycra was the perfectly normal and valid lifestyle choice of the future. Only a few people get into funny looking threads and those few are aliens.  The bland Star Trek sets are kind of like community theater.  You’re not supposed to notice them.

In Birds of Prey, the whole set-up is backwards.  Most people, extras and Dinah and Oracle at her dayjob, are all picture-perfect and real as real.  The ones who aren’t real are Huntress, Batgirl, and any villain we’re supposed to take seriously, like the Joker.  And I’m sorry, but it just doesn’t work.  Joker doesn’t look scary.  He looks like my neighbor kid got into the cheap Halloween greasepaint again.  It’s comical, and not in the echoes the fine world of graphic novels sort of way.

Much like any TV, good storytelling would have carried the show through bad costume, silly sets, and ridiculous special effects.  I’m sorry to say that it’s just not here.  So much potential, so many cool characters, and….we get cliches and some heavy-handed acting.

16 thoughts on “What the hell did I just watch: Birds of Pretty I mean Birds of Prey

  1. This female crime-fighting “sexy” costume business is like a broken record under an eternal curse in a vortex hell dimension. But the hell dimension is actually an elaborate joke being played on the hypnotist who has you in their thrall.
    Uh… too fussy?
    What I mean is that it’s long past getting old. What is the impenetrable barrier between XX crime fighters and practical costumes, COOL-looking costumes.
    Do men at largetm HAVE to be titillated at all times lest they are immobilized by a mucous slime casing, or is this stuff just inertia at this point?

  2. Well, I pretend like I haven’t heard the arguments and justifications for it… I just feel like I’m missing something.

  3. It’s your own fault for watching Charlie’s Angels…um, or whatever this crap is. Oh, are these DC character/properties?
    Yikes.

  4. I have tried to watch the Birds of Prey series about five times now. I will make it through the pilot and then maybe start the second episode and lose all interest. I keep forgetting I really don’t care.

  5. You know, I think the main problem with this show, and a lot of other comics-related adaptions, is that the producers took it way too seriously. Superhero series—comics, movies, tv, etc—are, at their core, outlandish fantasies from the word go. You don’t take these things any more seriously than if you were doing Snow White or Goldilocks and The Three Bears. Maybe if tv and movie producers stop trying to pass this stuff off as “Law & Order”, we might get something watchable.

  6. Yeah, none of it looks like comics anyway…it’s not much fun to watch people who have absurd powers go around beating people up if they are in some sort of elaborate body armor, usually with breastplates, instead of the speedos they are supposed to wear, which face it don’t look good on everyone, and plus, half the time the feeble heroes carry guns (in Hollywood, even angels carry guns). It’s cheating. And how come they never figured out how to make the eyes in the masks blank?

  7. The blank eyes in superhero masks are artistic license on the artists’ part; drawing the eyes in those masks would make the hero look goofy (see Charles Flanders’s “Lone Ranger”), although some heroes (The Spirit and Black Cat come to mind) manage to pull it off just fine.

  8. Not even Adam West could save this clunker. It’s just so….bad. And yeah, totally my own fault, but dammit, I think a girl-group show in a city would be cool. But not this show. I suffer for my blogging, seriously. I can’t believe I made it through the whole forty minutes.

    Speaking of costumes, I was noticing that the Mentalist, which has a team of men and women, all dress in cop clothes. Suits, dark jeans, black boots. (One of the agents dresses a little more femme, but the extent is a floral print shirt, long hair, and an orchid on her desk.) I never find myself doubting the action scenes.

  9. <<>>>
    Eyes in masks of photographed heroes look no less goofy. The things done in comics don’t work in reality. As if one wouldn’t know who it is if one knew the person. Lois Lane would certainly know Superman even if he had glasses on, same with Batman’s eyes and square jaw showing through that cowl. It is ridiculous.
    If a comic is done well as a comic then it is lessened by being made into a film. The cartoonists dying to have films made from their work show a lack of faith with the comics medium or just a desire for money…understandable but I haven’t seen a tolerable film made from a comic yet. Crom help us when Holy Terror hits the big screen.

  10. I get major embarrassment squick reading Alex Ross stuff. I always want to shake the superheroes and say, “Put on some clothes, you look ridiculous!”

    James, I’ve enjoyed some anime that was made from manga, where the movement on screen allowed the fight scenes to come to life, but yeah, never live action. Sad.

    I dunno about a column. Talk about suffering for my art! But there are a few other things I’ve meaning to watch….

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