First Look: Midnight, Texas

3rd August 2017

Do you remember True Blood – Sookie, Lafayette, Bill, Eric? Well, you need to forget them. Welcome to Midnight where everyone is stranger still.

Midnight, Texas is the latest television series to be adapted from the books by Charlaine Harris writer of the True Blood. Ah yes, dearly departed True Blood. There’s no Sookie and it’s not all about vampires, sugar! No ma’am, all the supernatural beings are here; werewolf, vampire, witch, angel and they will get a look in if the pilot is anything to go by. Right from the opening scene, we are thrown right into the mix when the central character, Manfred Bernardo, does a reading for Rachel in his hotel room and her dead husband Harold makes an appearance none too happy hearing that she’s now dating his business partner, albeit they are taking it slowly. No sooner, does Manfred tell Harold he’s not welcome and cannot cross over that he has to high tail it out of there because he is being hunted down by the mysterious Hightower. It later transpires that his dearly departed Grandma, Zelda may have been running scams. She appears to him and tells him to go to Midnight, he’ll be safe there. Well Midnight is the archetypal one horse town and everyone is suspicious of a stranger just turning up. Midnight is very different in daylight so tells the resident vampire, Lemuel, who sucks energy as well as blood. To get things moving a dead person – Aubrey is found in the river. Who could have done such a thing and at the annual picnic no less. It appears that Midnight is a haven for the supernatural, just what has Manfred got himself into.

Manfred is a psychic and in order to get the full experience: yours truly was lucky enough to be given a reading by celebrity psychic medium, Ryan Gooding. Ryan like the main character in Midnight Texas is not only psychic but he also a medium meaning he hears and sees people from the other side. Much like Manfred, he confirmed that whilst a psychic medium can turn down the volume you can never truly tune out from hearing messages from the other side. His gifts run in the family, his mother is a psychic and his father is a medium. So with a healthy dose of skepticism I had a reading and let me tell you it was scarily accurate.

Midnight, Texas suffers from a few things and one is not having Alan Ball writing it. I hate comparison but it has to be done this time.

With True Blood it set the tone right from the pilot – sexy, sardonic and strange all perfectly mixed up. True Blood’s opening title sequence is still one of my all time favourites of any television show. I want to be fair to Midnight, Texas it was light on laughs in the pilot although I am slightly intrigued by it, loved the talking cat, more of him please, and the special effects are decent enough. The main issue is that everything was revealed in the pilot, all the supernatural creatures when in actual fact a slow reveal would have been better – less is more. Having said all that, this is definitely a television series that is perfect for a binge – save up those episodes and then give yourself over to midnight. Well that is what I intend to do!

Midnight, Texas is shown every Thursday at 9pm on Syfy UK.

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