KILLJOYS: Friday 9PM on Syfy – If Nothing Else Is On…
KILLJOYS is yet another sparse, grungy Syfy Canadian cheapie, although it has a bit of B-movie verve. It concerns a pair of galactic bounty hunters, the beauteous yet deadly Dutch (Hannah John-Kamen) and her more easygoing junior partner John (Aaron Ashmore). They work for an organization called RAC whose main client is The Company, your basic evil multi-planetary mining conglomerate. There are rumors of class war among the galaxies, but RAC claims to be determinedly apolitical, as are our heroes. Things get complicated when D’avin’s (Luke Macfarlane) name crosses their scanners, since he’s John’s long-lost brother, and John decides to rescue him from RAC and The Company’s clutches.
The pilot, written by series creator Michelle Lovretta, sets up the premise and conflicts for the season: by the end of the hour, D’avin has informally joined his brother and Dutch (and smoldering looks have already been shared with the latter), while mysterious backstories have been put into place. We have a glimpse of D’Avin’s jumbled PTSD war flashbacks, while Dutch’s memories of her childhood involve her being carefully trained to kill, apparently by her father, who is now somehow back in her life. (He saves her from the effects of a poison dart.) Someone is also interfering with the inner workings of RAC, and The Company’s interest in D’Avin has to be explained.
Lovretta works her way through all of this briskly, with room for a spy posing as a monk, a competing bounty hunter and a futuristic cage match battle. There’s some welcome chemistry between John-Kamen and the two men, all of whom manage to put a stamp on their characters in short order. Nothing in Killjoys is more than functional, however, and that includes its look and feel. Director Chris Grismer has drained much of the color out of the images, leaving a dingy brown, and action sequences are over-edited so that even a fight between two people barely makes spatial sense Much of the time, the show seems to be on a VHS tape circa 1996. Some of this may be an aesthetic choice, but mostly it appears to be the effect of a barely adequate budget.
None of these bargain shows have broken out for Syfy, and in an era when original programming is at least as much about branding as raw ratings (especially on basic cable, where subscriber fees are a key part of the economics), the network is taking a risk by putting so much of its identity into such low-rent content. But last week’s Dark Matter premiere didn’t score all that much worse than the far more expensive Proof and Complications on TNT and USA, so the model makes some sense, at least in the short term. Killjoys is content to be another interchangeable piece of science-fiction action product; the entity airing it could just as well be named The Network.
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