i hate period shows that try to be too 'pretty'...

One gripe i have whenever a television show attempts to recreate a period within the last 100 years is they always use new-looking clothes for all the characters, shiny restored vehicles for all the cars, clean and well-maintained streets and buildings for the sets, etc. The past was not ALL NEW AND SHINY AND CLEAN!!! This kind of approach derails a TV drama into fantasy territory rather than being taken seriously as a drama because, whether consciously picked-up by the audience or not, everything looks too "recreated" instead of authentic.

For instance, the first scene between Bernal and Simon Pegg in the jazz club--supposedly in a "colored" (lower-income) part of town looked as swanky as any club that might have been on the Sunset Strip. To me, it just stuck out as immediately unrealistic.

Did anyone watch the CBS series VEGAS that aired last year and was supposed to take place in Las Vegas in 1960? It suffered from the same case of "new-itis" that Mob City has, but you'd expect something like that from a show on American network TV. I was hoping a show on cable that Frank Darabont was calling the shots for would have avoided this pitfall.




. . . there's always room for Jello!