Being Human: Series One Verdict

Back in January I reviewed the first episode of Being Human. To summarise: I totally loved it. Last night the final episode of this series was aired: so did Being Human live up to my expectations?

Oh my god YES. YES it did. I completely loved it. I loved it more than I love Doctor Who. I am going to put that statement all by itself so that we can stand back in awe of it.

I loved it more than I love Doctor Who.

Yes. I'm shocked too.

I am trying to put my finger on what it was that appealed to me so much about it, and I've come down to the following: It was intelligent. It was emotional. It was surprising. It was funny.

Intelligent. Emotional. Surprising. Funny. I've rarely been so excited, so moved and so consistently wrongfooted by any TV drama - the only ones I can think of are real top-end shows like The Sopranos or The Wire, so to find these qualities in some humdrum little BBC3 yoof-oriented fantasy prog with a special effects budget that only extends to a plastic wolf mask is completely remarkable. The lesson: you don't need a huge budget, you just need a sharp script, a talented bunch of performers, and really good taste in incidental music. I'm taking notes.

Something else to admire: Being Human took proper risks. Key characters were killed often enough so you never felt safe. Plot expectations were set up and subverted. Yes, Owen killed Annie, we all saw that coming. But did anyone expect his reaction to her haunting him? Nina was always going to find out about George's secret. But who foresaw that she'd get implicated in that particular way?

And there's more: it was properly nasty and dark, which is what a horror-fantasy should be. The fact that it was aimed at adults (albeit young adults) and shown in a post-watershed timeslot meant, for example, that the violence could be really violent (George's beating by a gang of vampires), which in turn meant that the stakes (see what I did there?) were higher. Bad things could and did happen (Mitchell getting staked), extreme consequences of actions could be shown (the blood farm in the basement). There was just a hell of a lot more to it than in the average British fantasy show. Who was it that decided that fantasy should be for a "family" audience anyway?

The other key element was that in only six episodes, the three lead characters developed a deep, complex friendship that I was able to completely believe in and invest in. The budding will-they-won't-they dynamic between Annie and Mitchell, instead of taking centre stage as you might expect, is only a small part of it. I'm struggling to think of a TV drama which has been so convincing about the nature of friendship. This Life? That's going way back. And the minor characters were far better-drawn and more nuanced than usual for this kind of thing: Nina, Owen, Herrick, Mitchell's ex-girlfrind, the sarky vicar (bring him back for Season 2 please!) etc - they all added so much richness to proceedings.

I say "this kind of thing". Of course, British TV has produced weighty and important dramas which are better than Being Human - State of Play, Our Friends In The North, and so on. But what's so fantastic about Being Human is that it's shown that being a low budget, minority channel, "genre" series is no excuse for lazy scripting or dull, unimaginative storytelling. It has raised the bar for everyone. Top marks.

If you're in the UK, I think you can watch the whole of Being Human on iPlayer, but only for the rest of the week.