morlvera

OK, it's just a Hallmark movie, I shouldn't take it too seriously and a lot of the production crew will be on autopilot, but I wanted more nuance than this. I'm a little surprised at some of the "pro family" reviews as well. The main theme seemed to be "be as obnoxious to your unfamiliar guests as possible and maybe your daughter will marry someone like you".

This hardly seems the stuff of Christmas sentiment (unless you count The Grinch). I just couldn't buy into the bigoted hick stereotype as being gruff but lovable, just unpleasant. The daughter's role seemed to consist of smiling weakly while her boyfriend was metaphorically spat on from all sides. If the roles were reversed and the boyfriend's parents made her take ice cold baths every morning and strip naked to serve drinks to their society friends, somehow the family friendly motif would be put into sharp relief. Everybody's family could be this loathsome to strangers if they really tried, but why would you celebrate it? Why would you reward their climb from boorish vindictiveness to grudging acceptance as attaining a state of grace and forgiveness?

I know that TV movies tend to have broad-brush plot lines with little room for subtlety, but the creative contempt and continuous humiliation that the daughter's family put him through just irritates after a while and is too obviously there simply to hang the sub-plots from. No one would keep putting up with this level of abuse with little or no help from their partner and the unreality reminds you that this is just a product. You can't lose yourself in something this caricatured.

I never could get into this series, largely because of the over-whelming self-righteousness of the main protagonist.

Veronica seems to spend her life invading the space of everyone around her, planting bugs on her boyfriend's car (when not tracking his cell phone) and selfishly imposing her demands on others while never forgetting to be moralizing and nauseatingly judgmental on every voice-over. My sympathies were always with those around her, even the faintly pallid villains.

That aside, the acting wasn't too bad – just way too much hugging and learning at the denouement.

I must admit, I missed this first time around, but caught an episode when visiting relatives in the UK.

Not too convinced about the premise of the opening episode, with the implication that human cloning is somehow different, more complex and with the hidden imprimatur of the creator preventing a successful conclusion....it, ain't. If it's been done, it's been done and will turn out to have been no more complex than with any other animal. It's already been achieved with pigs and their physiology is remarkably similar to ours. What arises out of this is a profound and fascinating grab bag of ethical and moral implications, all of which the show seemed to side step, indeed it seemed more concerned with mid-market friendly metaphysical speculation on the nature of the soul - terror of the mid-west moral majority, perhaps?

For all the hype about an intelligent approach to real science that this show seems to have engendered on forums demanding it's return, I can't help thinking that it fought shy from dealing with the (potentially) terrifying banality of what cloning represents and how it has already become part of the everyday discourse of animal husbandry and research (witness the pigs that glow in the dark - I'm not kidding!). To have shown that human cloning was just as banal and all that that implied might have taken a courageous leap of faith that the producers were unwilling to consider. I do think it would have made for a far more interesting, if contentious, episode though. I'll bet HBO would have gone down that route.

Perhaps future episodes are better, I'm just not sure I can be bothered to find out.