After Watching all 39 Episodes...

I remembered this show as merely occasional background noise to my final two semesters on campus. It seemed to be a show that couldn’t decide what genre it belonged to. I remember staying a few weeks with my Auntie Phyllis in the spring of ’93, and she was positively annoyed by this show.

Then last summer I discovered a bit torrent containing all 39 episodes, and decided to download and gradually watch them all over the space of a few months.

Well, the experience proved not as annoying or disappointing as anticipated. In fact, such a show might even be a welcome addition to any youth or family time slot on contemporary television. There were plot and thematic references to quite a few sci-fi and speculative classics: Nineteen Eighty-Four, Fahrenheit 451, A Clockwork Orange, Lord of the Flies, etc. The acting was also better than average for such a show. Certain aspects of the writing, however, left a lot to be desired.

If this show had been produced out of the UK fifteen to twenty years earlier, it might have been another The Changes or Children of the Stones (look them up on YouTube or Daily Motion if you’re unfamiliar). If this show had had writers like those used on The Adventures of Shirley Holmes a couple of years later, it would have benefited greatly. As it stands, however, the show suffers from down-writing of the contemporary Canadian kind. Jay comes across as a whiney overgrown eight-year old rather than a young man in his early to mid teens. To see him wandering about, inquiring after ‘my dad’ is both remote and downright humiliating to someone of my generation and upbringing. They could have at least had the poor chap on a quest for his father, or, if hanging out with the pool-hall crowd, his old man.

Then again, aren’t virtually all North American shows as childishly down-written as this nowadays? When one considers it, a show like The Odyssey now actually appears refreshingly mature and intellectual alongside the rubbish of the past twelve years or so. Meanwhile, 1970s British and Swedish adolescent shows would have a problem airing even in an adult time slot in this day and age—programmes like The Changes and Den Vita Stenen would simply come across as too sophisticated, cutting-edge, sexually provocative, and ‘politically incorrect’. Yes, people, things have gone downhill that far and that fast.