In the US: Wednesdays, 9/8c, The CW
In the UK: Acquired by E4. To air 2014
Sometimes, the contrariness of US TV amuses me. Watch pretty much any US TV show these days and you’ll spot someone who isn’t American pretending to be American. Whether it’s simply the ubiquitous Canadians who permeate every show that’s shot for budgetary reasons in Canada (pretty much anything on The CW, for example), or the numerous Brits, Australians, New Zealanders and Scandinavians looking for jobs and pay in the US they’re never going to get back home, look close enough and they’ll be there, usually sporting a non-descript Mid-Western accent, in pretty much any show you care to mention.
Yet, when a show actually calls for some degree of international representation, not only will virtually all the characters be American, even the foreigners the producers bring in will be obligated to pretend to be from someone in Iowa.
Case in point is The 100, set in some distant, post-nuclear future, in which only a handful of humans from around the world have survived. They all live in The Ark, an amalgamation of all the world’s space stations, so naturally you’d expect just a few of them to not be American. Yet they aren’t. Even the obviously and famously Scottish Henry Ian Cusick from Lost is forced to feign US accent.
Bizarre.
Nevertheless, The 100 is a moderately interesting piece for The CW, which is rapidly turning into the ‘more sci-fi than the SyFy’ channel. Yes, we have all the standard tropes designed to appeal to young people of both genders – pretty, clean-cut, fit young things in various states of undress, emoting at each other and worrying about their teenage relationships. But these 100 pretty young things are all juvenile offenders, forced to return as guinea pigs to the irradiated world that is the Earth by the Draconian regime that runs The Ark. Will they all die of radiation sickness, get eaten by rabid rats or club each other to death?
Maybe, actually, which is surprising. In fact, some of them might even get killed before the end of the first episode…
Here’s a trailer.
Continue reading “Review: The 100 1×1 (The CW/E4)”
