I may just be shallow

While I have my own theories on what makes various shows work or not work for me, I can’t help but notice some correlation between the attractiveness of the lead characters and my tendency to gravitate towards the show.

Let’s look at my top two dramas, Grimm and Person of Interest. David Giuntoli and Jim Caviezel are both very attractive men. In addition, Caviezel has a certain physicality to which I am very susceptible.

I guess it is a combination of kinetic energy and grace. How can I explain this? From the ads for “A Perfect Murder” I had decided that Viggo Mortensen was quite good-looking, but seeing him sword-fighting and bashing heads in “The Lord of the Rings” took it to a whole new level.  When someone who has this quality is going to be doing a lot of action, it looks promising to me. It’s not always logical—the Bourne movies did nothing for me, but somehow Matt Damon’s fight scene in “Stuck on You” did, and the Bond movies are overkill for me, but Daniel Craig slamming Paul Dano into the bars in “Cowboys & Aliens” was great. Thank you for not judging.

Anyway, the thing that is interesting about this is that Alcatraz should have had a slam dunk here with Jeffrey Pierce. In both attractiveness and physicality he may be superior to both Giuntoli and Calviezel, and I do not make that claim lightly because they are beautiful and watchable men.

(Giuntoli is still my favorite, if for no other reason that he is single and I have a strong inner taboo against being attracted to married men, even for celebrity crushes. He gets a lot of Twitter proposals, though, so his days may be numbered.)

Alcatraz completely squandered what they had in Pierce. They wasted him! They created a really sympathetic character. He had a string of bad luck, but a minor robbery got him into federal prison, self-defense got him into Alcatraz, and there he was abused and lost the wife he adored. Pierce was nailing the emotions, and you could not take your eyes off of him. Okay, he’s a criminal, but fairly redeemable at that point, right? So let’s just have him kill four people in the first episode, two of them cops, one probably not as an effect of the brainwashing, and then see what you can do with him.

When I first saw the ads for Alcatraz, seeming Pierce moving is what sent me looking it up, and he wasn’t even in the main cast. I did some more digging, and saw he was a prisoner, but he was in multiple episodes, so I thought for sure that he would end up helping them, being an ally from the other side. Nope. They did not do anything interesting with him.

I realize that more use would not have fit in to their original model for the show, but if you are panning for gold and you happen to find a diamond, you don’t throw it away for not being gold. He was a diamond. Remember how The West Wing was supposed to focus on the staff and not the president, but then they changed it because Martin Sheen was so great? Yeah, then you may also remember that it got seven seasons. You know who’s canceled? Alcatraz.

One could argue that misuse of Jeffrey Pierce is merely one symptom of a general tendency to pursue bad ideas for that particular show. One the plus side, it occurs to me that Pierce would be perfect for, well, I’m calling it Foresight for now, but I don’t think that’s a particularly good title, and I hope to come up with a better one. He’s a little older than originally envisioned, but it totally works.

I see that I have gone off on a related tangent again, but my point is that it is a little unnerving to wonder how much of my television viewing is influenced by attractiveness. After all, with the existing series recording, White Collar, well, Matt Bomer is exceedingly pretty.

Is it really that I didn’t find Portlandia funny? Or is it that Fred Arminsen is not that good-looking? Is my problem with Leverage that I am only mildly attracted to Christian Kane (who beats up people very well)? Do I prefer Modern Family to Parks and Recreation because I prefer family-based humor to workplace humor, or is it that I think Ty Burrell is more attractive to Rob Lowe? Well, no, that’s not it.

Once Upon a Time may be the one that saves me here. Josh Dallas is not really my type, they tend to kill off the ones who are, and really my favorite is Robert Carlyle, who is not traditionally good-looking and is certainly not played up that way, but he’s captivating! And yet, here I go, uncomfortable thinking that I might be unduly influenced by attractiveness, and only able to defend myself by pointing out people I like who would be considered less attractive. This is just not good.

I’m going with that I like shows where there are likeable characters, good ensembles, writing that is logical but not necessarily predictable—at least I hope so. I mean, if I were truly shallow, wouldn’t I always be watching CW?