I watched the pilot...
How can a show be boringly conventional, and yet be really weird at the same time ? Watch "Damages".
Spoilers follow, but it looks like virtually everyone has seen the pilot (and I did read some of the Wikipedia entry to confirm where it was going).
It is cute and clever that the show appears to be "bright young lawyer joins altruistic law firm and each week they save another kitten.... er, group wronged by the wealthy" (since this is similar to the plot of
Leverage, the viewer is going to assume that) - but that is a "red herring" and it goes in the opposite direction.
Instead Glenn Close reprises her famous movie role, i.e. being secretly evil rather than just "bad".
The problem for me is that I don't watch lawyer shows partially because I share Shakespeare's view of them.
By the end of the pilot, I care nothing about any of the characters, and would like to see them all in jail at the earliest opportunity.
So, how is that different from other shows about bad people, like
Sons of Anarchy ?
Well, for one thing, the pilot of
Damages shares with the pilot of
Fringe of being really sssssllllllllooooooowwwwww (which frankly is true of most primetime TV dramas).
The in-between "color" scenes did not make me interested in anything going on, or any of the people. I think that certainly can depend on what the individual considers interesting, but it certainly did not have the quality of, for example,
Lost, where the characters could be interesting reading the phone book.
In the case of
Sons of Anarchy, the characters are more unusual and colorful, and are interesting just from that.
The fact that the Ted Danson character continues throughout the series, would seem to give the show the characteristic of a movie expanded into a series, in the sense that what looked to be just the plot of the pilot, is actually the plot for the whole series.
PS Some of the same criticisms apply to
Mad Men, and if I were looking for one more series, I would choose that instead, simply because it adds the entertainment of seeing the early 60's reproduced.
So, the story is clever (I can see why critics liked it), but it doesn't hold any attractions for me.
As always, movies, TV and music are mostly personal taste, and no one should let someone else's opinion diminish their own enjoyment.