The Gates: Slutty Vampires Take Up Roots

If you thought the sparkly vampire craze was over think again. ABC is jumping on the vampire gravy train (a good three plus years too late) with their newest TV drama “The Gates“.  While some folks who have yet to pick up a paranormal book in the last five years might be impressed with the story telling, the rest of us are a little weary of what ABC has to offer. With shows like “True Blood”, “Vampire Diaries” and “Being Human” cornering the market is there really room for another “Melrose Place” meets “Twilight”?  Let’s not forget the horridly failed attempt that CBS made with their trip to the dark-side. “Moonlight” was cancelled after its first season. “Blood Ties”, a Lifetime Network show picked up a few years ago actually survived for two seasons, but even with a small but loyal audience couldn’t hold on to it’s primetime slot.

Still, the show may surprise us. In her review for the L.A. Times Mary Mcnamara noted, “Of course there are a plenty of overworked “True Blood” meets “Twilight” motifs, but it seems just possible that “The Gates” will return to the roots of supernatural fiction, in which the monsters are just extreme versions of humanity.”

Then there are other reviews like this, my personal favorite, “In deciding what to call the show, the producers, one suspects, landed on and then rejected something like “The Real and Desperate Vampire Housewives of Somewhere that Looks an Awful Lot Like ‘The Truman Show.’ ” (Ginia Belffante, New York Times).  Ah yes, another mysterious unnamed city of perfection that is too good to be true and has now been invaded by vampires, werewolves, and witches. Are these the same housewives that protested Harry Potter in school libraries? It seems a little glitter and some bagged blood makes everything a-okay.

The Gates airs Sunday on ABC at 10/9c. For those of you not fortunate enough to have access to the show (i.e. our international readers), here is a sneak peak of what’s been airing on the U.S. networks over the last three weeks.

So what do you think? Is it worth watching? How does “The Gates” stake up to the other paranormal heavy hitters?