REIGN

*1/2 STARS (out of ****)

I don’t know if it’s a good idea to aim to be a “guilty pleasure.” It can happen by chance, or  maybe you’re the type of creator who is prone to think up ideas that are common in other “guilty pleasures.” Either way, if you use it as a mattress to cover up the fact that you are incapable of making something of quality, we’ll know. It’ll seem forced and we won’t like it. Reign doesn’t suck because it feels forced. I just wish that it was possible to make it a “guilty pleasure” on purpose so all of this wasn’t a complete waste of time.

I know nothing about the story of Mary, Queen of Scots. I can gather a few facts about her, based on her title, but that’s it. If that’s the case, I shouldn’t be able to watch Reign and scream “BULLSHIT” twenty times during the pilot. We meet Mary as a young woman who is getting shipped to a different country for an arranged marriage. The prince is ready to marry – if it is necessary for his country – but for right now, is in love with someone else. Also, people are trying to kill and/or rape Mary. This is all wonderful! We don’t need anything else to make a show, right? This shit writes itself.

It writes itself in that it feels like this information was fed into a computer that spit out a script much like a player piano spits out a song: the notes are there, but the voice and feel are not. Let’s take my favorite (and by favorite, I really don’t know if I mean favorite or least favorite) scene of the pilot. One of Mary’s “friends” leaves a party and runs upstairs because she needs to rub one out. She stops halfway up, and just does it there because she can’t wait a second longer. The king (Mary’s future father-in-law) happens to come across this situation and decides to help the young lady out, first with his hand, and then with other body parts, probably. Delicious!

The fact that this dumb-as-fuck scene was in their show was enough for the Reign makers. It makes no sense as far as the story goes, either before it happens or after. And there’s nothing campy about it. They want us to get into this shit in the same way we would get into True Blood or Scandal, but it just comes off flat…and creepy.

If you’re going to throw all history overboard (I’m sure it’s a terribly uninteresting story that hasn’t stood the test of time), then do something else with it other than make it more boring. You’ve given yourself license to make it less boring because you’ve made it so you can do whatever you want. Sleepy Hollow won’t go down as the best new show of the fall but at least it had the balls to not always care about the original legend in order to have crazy shit happen. The creators of Reign care even less about the original legend their show is based on (even though it’s based on real people) only to make it more like every other crappy teenage show on TV right now. It’s not as if they said “Sweet! Mary, Queen of Scots! We can do something different!” They instead said “All these stupid costumes and locations are keeping us from making the insipid tripe we want to make.” Don’t get too down on yourself, Reign creators. I think you succeeded in what you wanted to do, despite the costumes.

– Ryan Haley