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Our Fair City, Season One

The first act takes its sweet time in getting to the main conflict. We have about seven episodes of getting to know the setting, through the eyes of different characters for almost every episode, up until episode seven. I am enjoying the structure, which is essentially one scene equaling one episode. Each episode is less than ten minutes. This is both a strength and a weakness. Its strength is that in this age of boredom, the pacing is fast and snappy and doesn’t give you the chance to be bored. It’s a weakness, because you want more of what it has to offer.

As for the actual story, i felt the middle of the season surpassed the beginning and end. The beginning took too long to get to the main plot and the ending lacked dramatic tension. It succeeds at being a comedy, but in terms of drama, it didn’t do it for me. This begs the question of is “Our Fair City” a comedy, or a drama? It has enough drama in the middle that it could go both ways. This doesn’t really become a problem until adulthood, when you want your pure comedy and pure drama separated. Obviously there is overlap, because pretty much every drama needs a humorous element in it. Although going the other way rarely works, from what I’ve experienced (going from humor to drama).

As I stated earlier, the middle of season 1 is quite a rare phenomenon, because the middle usually is the most boring to write. This usually reflects in the story as  long and boring expository scenes or information that doesn’t really matter to the story. I never got that sense that the writer was “filling a word count goal,” so to speak, in the middle. I basically mean that the middle doesn’t drag on and give useless bits of information that the individual already knows.

To sum up, if you can get past first seven to eight episodes of somewhat trivial infodumps, you’ll enjoy what this season has to offer. The ending–though surprising, yet inevitable–lacks a dramatic punch you would expect from any kind of season finale, regardless of whether it’s humor or drama.

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