The State of ‘Haven’ Address [SyFy Series]

As part of our blistering recap schedule here at The Bunker, the SyFy original series Haven is teetering on a precipice bedeviled by loose gravel. In other words, it probably ain’t gonna make it. At least not as a continuing feature on The Bunker and I honestly can’t see it sticking around on the tube for long anyway. Why, you may ask? Well, I’m going to do my best to sum up the show’s weakness and also pass along a few ideas to the public conscience that would greatly improve the show.

Lets get the shortest piece out of the way first:

What is right with Haven?

Nothing, really. Emily Rose (Audrey Parker) and Lucas Bryant (Nathan Wournos ) are passable actors in this series who probably have the potential for greater things if they were given a script that made sense, was intriguing, or had realistic dialogue and interesting character arcs. They have none of those things in Haven.

What is wrong with Haven?

A more appropriate question. The answer is mostly everything. Here is how each story has played out so far:

• Something strange happens, Parker and Wournos investigate.
• They draw a hasty conclusion based on seemingly slam-dunk evidence.
• They are wrong.
• The duo proceeds to systematically suspect everyone associated with the strange occurrence, each time believing they’re right.
• And they never are. Until there is twenty minutes left in the show and then whatever person in the circle of characters for the week that has yet to be suspected ends up being the person “guilty.”
• I use guilty in quotes because there is never a bad person in the show. The strange and vaguely threatening occurrences have thus far always been due to a good person doing something they cannot control.

Ok, I get it that most shows have a formula, but this is a dry and boring formula that never delivers any tension whatsoever. Although the show is aired at 10pm on Friday nights, the tone of the show is more inline with Sunday early primetime shows from the 90s like Life Goes On. That misses an X-Files vibe by quite a bit.

Haven commits the critical crime of telling everything, showing nothing, and not allowing its viewers to personalize the experience. There are huge dialog chunks that are supposed to convey tension or fear or anger, but all it is is empty words. None of the tense, scary, or anger-inducing events are fleshed out or allowed to develop. Past histories are summed up in a convenient to or from car conversations. People get mad at each other for seemingly no reason only for it to be explained in an over verbose manner. The actors robotically recite lines to explain emotions that have no apparent relationship to the weekly or greater story. All of that has the cumulative effect of stonewalling any potential emotion tie with the viewer.

There is no mystery solving. Parker and Wournos walk or drive back and forth stomping around the same locations over and over until the weird event of the week happens often enough for them to rule out suspects that they can personally vouch for. Whoever is left – that’s their guy! Not exactly an efficient crime solving method.

Did I say crime? I’m sorry, I mistyped. I didn’t mean “crime,” I meant “___________,” because there is no crime*, there is nothing threatening, there is nothing interesting.  The “threat” never seems like something more than what would mildly affect a handful of slightly inconvenienced individuals.  The yawn inducing nature of those traits work even less because the events of each week are self contained and do not lend to a serialized storyline. It’s ok to be episodic, but not when the sum results of the episode are to laugh off the events and then it is like nothing ever happened. The storyline, characters, and motivations have no gravitas, doesn’t contribute to a larger mystery**, and there is no villain to juxtapose the protagonists against. The best the show can do so far has been The Evil  Embezzler and the Mean Reverend With A Drinking Problem. And even they are not reoccurring characters, but rather one off plot devices.

*An escaped convict is accidentally killed in the pilot. Take that for what its worth.

**There might be a larger mystery, but the viewer is never left with any threads that he may hope to tie together in the next episode.

Not only is there no one to root for in the show because there is no entity to root against, but the entire concept of the show is wasted because of how badly the supernatural events are used.

In the X-Files, for instance, there was constant serialized sub-story involving Mulder’s past, The Smoking Man, and covert government programs with regard to aliens. Additionally, the strange events that took place each week had a basis in actual common supernatural lore or myth, lending an authenticity to each show. A guy who thinks he is a vampire, someone with telekinesis, spontaneous combustion, alien abduction, and many more common conspiracy or urban legends were explored in the X-Files which maintained the familiar elements of the legend in its stories and hence a relationship to the viewers.

In the television show Supernatural, much the same method is used. Many episodes explore exclusively the events surrounding deeply rooted supernatural urban legends like The Lady in White or the Haunted Asylum or The Closet Monster. Each of these familiar boogeymen allows a connection with the viewer because we all have our opinions or experiences with the well known phenomena. This strategy has the added benefit of making more original ideas, like the demon stalker and the people burning on the ceiling, have a more resounding buy-in because the viewer is so familiar with the rest of the lore used in the show.

Haven, however, makes up its strangeness from scratch.  Perhaps a stronger writing team could pull off full on originality, but the entire show would have to be dedicated to such an ambitious design. What we have with Haven is the manifestation of piecemeal phenomena that does not tap into familiar territory which would allow the viewer to fill in the blanks on his own. Therefore a half-assed telekinetic weather controller person has no point of reference in common myth, lore, or urban legend. It exists only for one episode and therefore comes off as thin, silly, and poorly realized because the audience is not allowed to drawn on their own knowledge. That’s what creates buy-in in any show-movie-novel, the way an author will lead with just enough information to allow the reader-viewer to fill in his own details based on his experiences or the scattering of retained information rattling around in his memory.

The second episode of Haven featured a person with some sort of dream-power where the familiar items in his bedroom somehow relate to his dreaming as he can manipulate similar themed items in the waking world to affect people that are causing some stress in his family’s life. That’s crazy hard to explain, but that is as close as I can get. The person has some magnets in his room, so it totally makes sense that when he falls asleep and dreams, even if not in his room, that he would be able to wield some magnetic force that would manifest itself in the real world. There is a painting of lightning striking water in his bedroom, so it is totally logical that his dream power would enable him to cause a flood in a hallway, lock all the doors, and make a live power line appear out of nowhere to threaten the protagonists. Additional to this dream power, he can also project his astral presence and is able to communicate with conscience people; and they with him.

See what I mean? None of that makes any sense. There is no linear scope to the phenomena nor any familiar reference points in which a viewer can use to orient himself. Not to even mention that the freaking dream power was cured by a prescription drug at the end of the show. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Finally, there is the photograph. If you are not sure what I am talking about, you can read my first recap to get an idea. In short, there is a photo that Agent Parker discovers of a woman that looks just like her. The photo was taken at a crime scene an is captioned “The Colorado Kid.” Parker thinks it has something to do with her parentless upbringing. Nathan reveals in the second episode that he thinks it has something to do with why he can’t feel pain and that everything is interconnected.

That might be interesting, but all the actors are doing is saying this crap, there is nothing in the show – seen through events or actions – that support the claim. It’s the laziest writing I have ever seen. It’s like the makers of the show said, “Ok, now, we have to push along our little mystery involving the photo. We are not going to directly relate it to anything else that happens in the show at this time, so any ideas on how to address it?” And someone answered, “Oh, we can just have Parker and Nathan talk about it in a park at the end of the episode *sniiiiif*.”

“Ok, what a dandy idea.”

How Can Haven Be Fixed?

It can be fixed, but I predict it will not be. This show is likely DOA and will vanish to oblivion sometime soon. However, if someone were to consult me on how to improve the show, I would have some recommendations:

• Create a menace. There has to be a person, organization, or force that the Parker-Wournos duo are out to foil.
• Relate the episodes. It does not have to be all out serialized, but many genre shows are able to carry events over to the next week or an episode down the line to lend the show symmetry, coherency, and more importantly – buy-in. I can tell that this strategy is not in the cards for the show. It is being presented as a straight up static show and it is not working.
• More action. The show is down right boring. With no villain and without the feeling of any actual threat, the show plays out as a family drama. Family dramas are fine, but not as a genre show on SyFy at 10pm on Friday nights.
• Kill someone. One way to make the viewer believe that he is witnessing something threatening is to have someone die every once in a while.
• Beyond creating a menace, maybe the person that causes the disturbance can occasionally have, you know, like bad intentions? It is very hard to build any tension on a non lethal occurrence created by a good hearted soul who didn’t mean any harm.
• Steam it up. So sue me. Emily Rose is cute, use it to an advantage.
• Stabilize the mythos. Introduce reoccurring elements and weave them in and out of episodes. Again, provide the viewer with some continuity and a richer world in which to explore.
• Darken the palette. I know it is a cheap trick, but a cheap trick is better than no trick. It may help the tone of the show some if every scene didn’t happened in the bright sun or well lit room. If you shoot it like a family drama, it’s going to look like a family drama.

Here is the deal on Haven as far as recaps go: It gets one more week. If there is an elemental shift in the quality and presentation of the show for its third episode, I will continue my recaps. If it maintains its tepid beginnings (my prediction), next week will be its last recap on The Bunker.