Midnight, Texas

If NBC’s new fantasy series (which debuts Monday) sounds like a jumble of every paranormal trope from Ed Wood’s “Night of the Ghouls” to HBO’s “True Blood,” that’s because it is, and wonderfully so.

Like “True Blood,” the cheese factor is high here, but that’s what made the HBO series so fun.

It will undoubtedly seem tame to staunch "True Blood" fans. But a few winks of humor and some good scares make Midnight, Texas more than you'd expect from a summer series on broadcast TV.

It's too loud and dumb to be really called good, but any fan of vampires, were-tigers or gaseously bloated corpses is going to have a fine time with it.

Midnight has a way to go to become TV's most bewitching hour, but it shows enough strange promise to merit a visit. [24 Jul - 6 Aug 2017, p.15]

Midnight, Texas could have been called “True Blood: The Next Generation” or even more precisely “True Blood: The Low-Budget Network Reboot.” Either way, it can’t shake a fang at the original.

The entire enterprise plays like a first draft rushed into production—too obvious to possess enough depth to keep viewers interested, and too weirdly unaware of its own goofy missteps to realize it should be in on the joke.

Mostly the show dutifully doles out a lot of the special effects viewers expect from a supernatural series. But it’s all noise and explosions of light with scant attention to character development or relationship building (beyond the one obvious romance), something “True Blood” got right early on.

Midnight, Texas is kind of like the Saturday matinee version of horror. It keeps the action moving along without much bite.

It’s the tame version of something you grew tired of on HBO years ago. And that’s putting it politely. There’s no energy here--sexual, supernatural, mystery. It’s just remarkably flat despite a talented cast doing everything in their power to make it interesting.

Little touches of character-driven darkness toward the end of the five episodes I watched maybe hinted at better things ahead for Midnight, Texas. I just don't see the pieces in place at the center of the cast or in the creative aspirations for Midnight, Texas to be anything more than a PG-rated version of what ought to be a decadent and overblown summer guilty pleasure.

Star Francois Arnaud, who plays psychic bad boy Manfred (everyone on the show has a silly name), is bland and affectless, and even a supporting cast that also includes an angel, a witch and some sort of international assassin can’t liven up the hodge-podge of elements from better supernatural dramas (including True Blood).

This is a show about a town filled with people who have supernatural powers, and yet its greatest power is to bore its viewers into TV-induced comas.

An overstuffed, often ridiculous supernatural drama that somehow manages to make a town filled with magical creatures seem crushingly dull.