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Mockingbird Lane: “Pilot”

I did not think it was possible, but the new Munsters reboot that goes by the name of Mockingbird Lane actually proved to be more watchable than I had imagined it would be when I first heard about the project. Of course, time will tell whether it will make a successful series as well -- especially since it seems more interested in catering to the type of people who watch cable shows like Dexter and True Blood and less to the hardcore fans of the original Munsters.

However, unlike the recent Night Stalker reboot that debuted a few years back, this show appears to have been made by people who have a healthy affection for the original series. True, they can't resist teasing the TV audience by, say, showing us a brief glimpse of an image that looked like a silhouette of the original Herman Munster's head, but for the most part, the show's producers show more respect for the original show than I expected.

Of course, they did a bit of updating the show as well. The current Herman and Lily Munster look more like normal human beings than the originals and even their son Eddie (played by Mason Cook) looks more like an average kid than the original Eddie Munster. Portia de Rossi's Lily has easily one of the most memorable character entrances I've seen on any TV show in a long while -- apparently episode writer Bryan Fuller is not shy about having the Munsters do things on this show that the TV censors of the 1960s would have never allowed on the original series -- and Jerry O'Connell makes for a likable -- if seemingly unlikely -- Herman Munster, who is a lot more physically affectionate with his wife than the original ever had the opportunity to be.

The new Marilyn (played by Charity Wakefield) seems a lot more odder than the original Marilyn Munster -- almost as if the writers were trying to compensate for the lack of ghoulish makeup in the rest of the cast. She whistles at ravens and shows no qualms about making a bid on a house once owned by a serial killer. For that matter, the new Grandpa (played by Eddie Izzard) is a lot more aggressive about his vampirism, at one point actually devouring a wild beast before the eyes of his own grandson.

However, the main difference between the new Munsters and the old is that the old Munsters made little if any effort to assimilate with the rest of the world. As far as they were concerned, they were the normal ones, and it was outsiders who looked like Marilyn who were deserving of pity. The new Munsters are more obsessed with appearance's sake. For example, when they find out that Eddie is a werewolf, they seem more worried about how it would look to the neighbors than about the more obvious downside of having a lycanthropic son. Only Grandpa doesn't worry about fitting in but then Grandpa is hardly an apt role model for any generation. Why his behavior doesn't have a legion of Van Helsing wannabes pursuing him is a question the episode never quite answers.

In any event, I can't help hoping that Mockingbird Lane will indeed become a series, if only to answer all the questions the pilot episode conjures up. And while my inner teenager can probably go on and on about Lily Munster's big entrance, I must confess that the one part of the show that really excited my inner Munsters geek -- a part of me that I had presumed dead for years, if not decades -- was the entrance of a very special Munsters character in the episode's last five minutes.

Apparently Mockingbird Lane creator/producer/writer Bryan Fuller really is a fan of the original series. Either that or he knows us Munster geeks better than we know ourselves.