Bitten: Season 1 (DVD) – Series Review
As there are already loads of vampire and werewolf series on the market, of which many are still airing, Bitten enters an already saturated market. With a main character that is called Elena, just like in The Vampire Diaries, we were wondering if this series would fall under the ‘been there, done that’ category. We decided to sink out teeth into Bitten, and were left with rather mixed feelings. We never truly howled for joy, while we were never truly bored either.
Elena (Laura Vandervoort) is quite content with her life, seeing she has a great job as an artist, a loving boyfriend, Philip (Paul Greene), and she’s an independent strong woman. While everything is pretty much perfect, Elena has one very dark secret, namely, she’s a werewolf. Even though she would love to tell Philip, as she is truly trying to build up a perfect life, she can’t, because that would mean Philip’s death. There’s a code of secrecy that is being enforced by the other werewolves and leaking information would mean the certain demise of those who know about these changelings. Luckily she’s able to talk with a close friend of hers, Logan (Michael Xavier), who is also a werewolf and member of the ‘pack’. Even though Elena tries to leave her past behind, she is still tied with the pack, as lone wolves are considered mutts, who can’t settle in one place. The reason why the pack moves around the ‘mutts’ is that werewolves age slower than normal human beings, thus they would raise suspicion.
When all of a sudden Elena gets called ‘home’, she has to lie to Philip once more and see what the pack needs of her. It seems that a mutt is killing right around the base of the pack, trying to get the pack-members in trouble. It soon becomes clear that the killer is a newly formed werewolf, who must have accomplices, as it’s too hard for one wolf to do on his own. The pack is under attack but no one knows who is behind all of it, or why.
While all of the above is already more than enough to worry about, Elena also worries about being able to live her own life without having to think about the pack. She left after her ex-boyfriend Clayton (Greyston Holt) messed things up quite badly but she still remains loyal to the alpha of the pack, Jeremy (Greg Bryk), as he has been the only father figure in her life. Things will get quite rowdy from here on out.
It takes some time before the proper pace is set in this first season of Bitten, seeing the first few episodes feel a bit long-winded. This creates a rather big threshold to overcome, seeing at first it feels like the series is trying to focus on sex more, rather than the actual story at hand. Nonetheless, when things finally get started, everything feels totally different, as the story is starting to properly evolve and the focus of the series seems to shift. Also, the further the season progresses, the more we get to learn about Elena’s past, as she hasn’t always been a werewolf. We get to see how it all went down and what caused her to ‘leave’ the pack.
Acting performances are decent, albeit not always that convincing. Some stereotypical characters don’t really suit the setting that much, which causes the other’s acting to suffer from their monotone behavior. Nonetheless, everything is still qualitative and in a certain way it feels as if the cast was still searching how to portray their characters in the best manner possible.
This DVD edition of the first season came with all the typical special features such as behind the scenes footage and deleted/alternate scenes, which will certainly add a bit of extra material to the equation. A few original extras were added as well, which could have used a bit more exploring. You’ll see how the wolves were created, which is certainly interesting, but also how some fights were placed together. The latter was very amusing, but it could have been even better if they showed the transition from practice to how it was played out in the series.
Conclusion
Bitten: Season 1 struggles to find its place between all of the other similar series but does manage to pull its own weight when the story gets kick started after a few episodes. If you can overcome that threshold of hardly anything going on at the beginning, this series will prove to be interesting when things are starting to go down. With a cliffhanger at the end of this season, things will surely prove to get interesting in the second one.
Bitten: Season 1 (DVD) - Series Review,
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