First things first, scores out of ten for each episode, in ascending order:
1x06 - Love Me, Leave Me - 7.0 impenetrable bra-straps
1x09 - Paperwork Junkie - 8.0 changeroom make-out sessions
1x12 - Loose Lips Sink Ships - 8.0 non-sexual sleepovers
1x11 - What A Friend's For - 8.0 crossbone-emblazoned picks
1x02 - I Liked You A Whole Lot Better When You Were Dead - 8.0 still-wrapped lollipops
1x03 - I Was A Teenage Headline - 8.0 slanderous high-school newspaper articles
1x07 - Best Day Ever - 8.0 wide sombreros
1x04 - Inaction Reaction - 8.5 Disney Princess lunchboxes
1x01 - Connect - 9.0 vampire toys
1x08 - All In The Details - 9.0 rhetorical questions
1x13 - Employee Of The Month - 9.0 uninformed Prime Ministers
1x05 - Talk - 9.5 forged parental signatures
1x10 - Last Stop Sanity - 9.5 pairs of magic scissors
Season 1 Average: 8.42 Bacon And Egg McGuffins
I literally have no idea where to begin tearing shreds into this. It's just impossible. I'm, like, the most negative, nitpicky person this side of a talent show judge, and even I was blown away by the quality of this season. If you had some sort of machine that made pure awesomeness tangible, this is what it would come out as. Probably with a little green ribbon wrapped around it or something.
Seriously, I am pretty much the last person on the planet who would give out a perfect ten for something, and I came damn close a few times during the season -- the two 9.5 grades would both have been 10.0's, were it not for a tiny SPAG error. I think one of the 9.0's would have been close too, if there wasn't... a couple I'm forgetting about right now that's probably obvious. Damn sleep deprivation. (Vi, honey, I know exactly how you feel. Apparently, reuniting families and discovering cheating parents is much more similar to mocking reality TV than I think any of us -- me incuded -- realised.)
The biggest strength this show has, I think, is that it doesn't stick to anything resembling a format. Every episode is something completely different from what's come before, even though the characters and settings may be similar, and it's very refreshing to have something like that with the endless slew of cop shows and fly-on-the-wall sitcoms/documentaries on Actual TV at the moment. Love. It.
You know, I looked at the cast pages before I started reading, and unless there's someone I'm forgetting (in which case I blame Tiger Woods, because who hasn't recently?), I don't think I've ever actually watched any of these people in any of their past works. But the characters were so vivid and distinct that I had no problems at all identifying them after the first episode. It's so unusual, at least to the relatively-unread me, to be able to picture characters so well and also to have a plot, that I have almost literally no idea how you managed to get both done in... what was it, sixty pages? Amazing.
In short: What everyone else has been saying for years. Can't wait to find out who this Crenshaw person is. (This is me, trying to find time to simultaneously read season two and mentally undress Andrew Friar.)
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