tv.com has Moonlight in the top 100 shows of all time!

[allegrita]

Funny how Moonlight fans weren't mentioned in that story...

[Lilly]

Alle, they used the "R" word...

[Josefismysire]

Alle, they used the "R" word...

You mean, "Rad", right, Lilly?? Cuz we are that, you know..

[Lilly]

Well, we're "Rad" now (thanks to Alex ), but back then the correct word hadn't quite gotten around....

[allegrita]

Well...they did use the "R" word, but they combined it with "entertainment junkies," a term that does NOT apply well to ML fans, many of which weren't fans of anything before ML. So... I just assumed they were talking about someone else.

Rad is the best term. Love that guy...

[jmc]

Hey Nielsen was fun while it lasted. It loaded so slowly on this old computer with my crawling dial-up that I'd spend my whole lunch hour just making a couple of posts. That was the Moonlight playground and if we didn't break it, it wasn't for lack of trying!

[OnceBitTwiceShy]

Our local paper had yet another article in the entertainment section today about the popularity of vampire shows, books and movies. (Josef would freak, more vampires on the brain of humans) Too bad CBS didn't realize they were cutting edge-if they tried one more season Moonlight would easily be in the top shows now on TV! I think that Vampire Diaries is extremely trite.

[darkstarrising]

Our local paper had yet another article in the entertainment section today about the popularity of vampire shows, books and movies. (Josef would freak, more vampires on the brain of humans) Too bad CBS didn't realize they were cutting edge-if they tried one more season Moonlight would easily be in the top shows now on TV! I think that Vampire Diaries is extremely trite.

I tuned into Vampire Diaries and left .....unimpressed....for one, this is aimed at a much younger audience, and that young I'm not. For another, for every minute of show, there must have been a matching one of commercial....life's too short.

But that got me to thinking about why Moonlight worked....the actors were all late 20s / early 30s, again, young enough to be my kids. So why did I fall under the spell they cast? The difference in ML is that the actors had a breadth of experience behind them that the actors in Vampire Diaries don't. With that experience comes the ability to make the characters 3 dimensional, giving them a depth that wasn't evident in Vampire Diaries' characters.

For example, Jason Dohring as Josef Kostan. Originally, the role was cast with a much older actor and it would have been very easy for the viewer to believe that the character was centuries old. Jason had to work to make you believe that his character had the wisdom and experience of four centuries of existence. Yet while his interpretation of Josef was a vamp who re-invented himself to go with the times (staying eternally young), Jason could portray Josef as an older man, one who'd loved and lost and still felt the pain of that loss. How many of you didn't feel his pain when he spoke of living 350 years to find Sara, only to lose her in one?

We saw more stages in the life of Mick St. John than we did Josef Kostan. Alex portrayed those various stages convincingly, everything from the besotted human musician falling under Coraline's spell to the angst ridden vamp a half century later. We see a man who wanted the American dream and instead got an eternal nightmare, all the while trying to hang on to some semblance of humanity. Yet just underneath the skin, the vamp lay waiting....as Lee Jay Spaulding and Tejada found out.

Maybe it's just me, but I think the very young actors in Vampire Diaries have their work cut out for them...their characters just don't come across as being as old as they're supposed to be.

[Lilly]

Excellent comparison and analysis, dsr. You may want to cross post this to the Vampire Diaries thread: here