Spelling's Out for Blood With a Clan of Vampires

MARVIN KITMAN

HAVING EXPLORED SOCIAL issues of the New South in "Savannah" on WB (WPIX / 11) and wholesome cultural values in "Malibu Shores" on NBC already this second season, Aaron Spelling last night on Fox began examining an alternative lifestyle in San Francisco in "Kindred: The Embraced."

From the humorous vein Spelling goes to the jugular vein as "Kindred" starts in its regular time slot tonight at 9, replacing "Party of Five." Spelling, who some might say has driven a stake through the heart of American culture with his trash, focuses in this one-hour drama series on five contemporary and sophisticated clans of vampires in San Francisco who call themselves the Kindred.

Vampires in San Francisco? I always knew it. They have so many strange people wandering around that city. Transylvania-by-the-Sea? Why not?

The Spelling series these days usually combine the elements of "Melrose Place" and "Charlie's Angels," his biggest modern successes. This is much heavier.

While it has its usual gorgeous, trendy '90s people - all white bread regardless of color - it is history! Based on a novel by Mark Rein-Hagen and created by filmmaker John Leekley, "Kindred" tells the story of another San Francisco, one dating back to the early California Gold Rush. The '49ers had their vampires, apparently. These '49ers now live and interact among the non-vampires or so-called humans in the city. They have their own customs and language, beyond "whatever" ("embraced," for example, is the word for doing "it").

Actually they aren't called "vampires" in "Kindred," a trend I noticed on Fox as early as the 1991 multi-generational epic "Blood Ties." Created for Spelling by Richard and Esther Shapiro ("Dynasty"), it followed an extended family of vampires who preferred to be known as "Carpathians." Vampires have almost as bad a press these days as Aaron Spelling.

In the last attempt to present this minority in a more favorable light, the Carpathians were trying to assimilate. In "Kindred" the vampires are already "in." They are in the media, city hall, the hospitals, the motorcycle gangs, Chinese tongs, even the police and organized crime. They have their own hip club. They ride limos and Harleys and wear designer clothes and earrings.

"Kindred" makes you look at your friends and neighbors more closely. How do you know your girlfriend isn't one of them? Anybody who is gorgeous, a good dresser or without a heart is suspect after two hours in Spelling and Leekley's world. Maybe even the network executives are vampires. And what do we really know about Aaron Spelling himself? He's ageless, the Ponce de Leon of TV.

"Kindred" goes beyond "The X-Files," which only presupposes the government is out to get us. This suggests that everybody is out to get us - through "the masquerade," the way the Kindred live among us and obtain positions of power in popular culture and human society, especially organized crime. Talk about your free-floating paranoia.

"Kindred" was very unclear in the two-hour introduction about who's who in this conspiracy. As I gather from reading the press releases, there are five vampire families battling for control of society.

All of this is more complicated than the new major league baseball interleague play schedule. But in the battle over who controls organized crime, the major preoccupation of the current arc of shows, what happened to the Mafia? Gone. No problem. The Cosa Nostra should sue for character defamation.

The Prince of the City, the new Godfather, is Julian Luna (played by Mark Frankel), publisher of the leading newspaper. Not The Sun, I'm sure. He lives in the biggest mansion on the hill and never comes out by day. It's an evening paper, fortunately. By his own admission, he is a lot older than we think. Nobody ever questions that he seems to be in remarkably good shape for a man who may be between 140 and 180 years old. Why, he looks even better than George Hamilton!

It's a strange world Spelling and his spellbinders are opening up. There's a lot of hard drinking going on. Blood, or ketchup, is yet another substance to abuse. Keep your Bud Lite, man, those Bloody Marys of Spelling's must give you quite a rush. They drew more blood the first two nights than hockey games.

There were also a lot of hickeys. "Embracing," or sex, has some quaint customs. Among the rules in dating: Embracing without permission is a serious offense, punishable by death.

Kindred folk spontaneously heal, so they can even take bullets. On the downside, they can burst into flame. Talk about your spontaneous combustion.

There is also more talk than action, some of the dialogue sounding 150 years old. "I have a taste for you," a thirsty one said last night. But at least they don't say "Fangs a lot."

"Kindred: The Embraced" is not "Dark Shadows." Unfortunately, perhaps. It's not Anne Rice. It's Aaron Spelling. Instead of the usual vapid airheads and nincompoops, we have vampires.

But Spelling and his trash masters have struck a blow for every vampire in America. "Kindred" is a pro-vampire story. It makes them seem preferable to humans. Maybe in L.A. that's true.

"The Kindred" masquerade ball, whatever, is an appealing concept today, especially the ageless part. Whatever Julian Luna and his crowd are into in alternative medicine sure beats plastic surgery.

The show is liable to turn the whole country into vampires the way Spelling has a whole hip generation acting like Melrose Placeniks. What happens if this isn't all a joke and there really are vampires, or at least vampiroids? I need a few hundred years to figure this all out. Suffice it to say now, "Kindred: The Embraced" is much deeper than "Malibu Shores" and "Savannah," you all.

Bon appetit, vampire lovers. To watch future shows I'm going to get a necklace of garlic, some silver bullets and a wooden cross. A warning: If you tape this, don't try to watch until after sunset. My tape went up in smoke Sunday afternoon.
 

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
April 5, 1996

DARK VICTORIES

Fox brings new blood to its mid-season lineup with two wickedly fun dramas--the vampire epic 'Kindred: The Embraced' and the high-finance serial 'Profit.

By Ken Tucker

Here we have two additional reasons to give up on Melrose Place. Why keep watching that increasingly sorry mess when you now have these new super-fab Fox soaps to add to your already decadent viewing schedule? PROFIT (Fox, Mondays, 9-10 p.m.) and KINDRED: THE EMBRACED (Fox, Wednesdays, 9-10 p.m.) could not be more different from each other. Lean and gratifyingly mean, Profit is about Jim Profit (Adrian Pasdar), a ruthless businessman snaking his way up the corporate ladder; the wonderfully complicated Kindred: The Embraced features five clans of vampires, snarling and sucking in contemporary San Francisco.

Mind you, I didn't want to be drawn into either of these series. Big-business hugger-mugger bores me stiff. And as far as classy vampires go, let me put it this way: Anne Rice novels have always struck me as literature for people who don't know who Angela Carter or Jonathan Carroll are. But Profit and Kindred are uncommonly sharp shows.

Just as the structure of Profit is as sleekly simple as its title, so Kindred: The Embraced is knottily mystifying. This much can be ascertained. San Francisco harbors a quintet of vampire tribes: The Ventrue (savvy aristos), The Brujah (thuggish mobsters), The Gangrels (model-handsome punks), The Nosferatu (the oldest and most traditionally vampire-like), and The Torreadors (arty types). Together, they form The Kindred, and for a human to have blood withdrawn by any of them is to be "embraced."

Kindred is The Godfather soaked in blood. The vampires' chief opponents are one another (war between the clans breaks out) and a human cop played by C. Thomas Howell (see box on page 66). As a protagonist, Howell is hopelessly lightweight; he's the biggest name in the cast, yet you want someone to sink fangs into his neck ASAP. Far more appealing is the elegant, intelligent prince of the Ventrue, Julian Luna (Mark Frankel). This "boss of all bosses" tries to keep the peace among The Kindred even as he's being drawn romantically to a human reporter (Kelly Rutherford) whom he knows he should not, um, embrace.

Both Kindred's Frankel and Profit's Pasdar are stage-trained actors who bring two distinctive brands of menace to the small screen. They're playing heavies, but sympathetically. If Profit has the edge right now, it's because its antihero is such an instant gas. But I wouldn't be surprised if the dense allure of Kindred, notwithstanding Howell, proves equally habit-forming.

Grades: Profit: A Kindred: A-

The Couch Critic

Kindred: the Embraced
Fox, Wednesdays, 9 P.M./ET
By Jeff Jarvis.

I would've loved to hive been a fly on the wall---or, as a critic is  more likely to be portrayed in  Hollywood, a cockroach in the corner---  when TV execs hatched Kindred. "Let's make a
`Godfather' with fangs," says one. What? "Think of it as vampires in Dallas." Why? "Then why not
a Transylvanian X-Files?" Oh, OK.

Thus was born a mob/soap/conspiracy vampires series that dumbfounds me.   Maybe that's because I never grasped the entertainment value of vampires. Are puncture wound hickeys really so sexy? But I could be wrong, for there's certainly no shortage of retellings of the Vampire  myth.

This one is a dark and oddly stiff story of clans of vampires who masquerade as normal folk running businesses in modern San Francisco.  They are ruled and kept at peace by their prince, Julian Luna (Mark
Frankel), a dapper don whose excuse for coming out mostly at night is that he likes the club scene. C. Thomas Howell plays a cop determined to catch Luna red-handed (or is that red-toothed?). But Howell
doesn't know his own partner is one of Them (we can tell because when they  think vampirey thoughts they look as if they have cataracts). He also does not know that his nemesis, Luna, is actually his quardian, sworn to protect him as the dying with of a mutual girlfriend.

Sound complicated? That's nothing. These poor actors are forever forced to explain who's on first. A deputy tells Luna what he must already  know about a clan: "The Brujah will force this war.... You hate
them as much as I do, and you are strong." Of they pick apart vampire morality  in mock Talmudic debates: Jeff Kober (of China Beach) feels sorry for a dying boy, so he wants Luna to "embrace" the kid---suck his blood,  turn him into a vampire, make him immortal, and thus save his life.  But Luna decrees: "We never embrace children, no matter how merciful it  might seem." And I start wondering who's right, silly me.

There are three reasons to make a vampire show: It can be funny, but Kindred has only a few gags (a cop investigating a man's spontaneous combustion insists, like The X-Files' Gillian Anderson, "There is a normal, everyday reason for this"). Or a vampire show can be sexy, and Kindred tries to score there but gets so caught up in its corporate politics, it turns into a turn-off. Or it can have something to say, and I thought that was where Kindred was headed fro the first scene, when a vampire was killed with a cross-shaped TV antenna plunged into the heart. (This comes soon after Fox's Profit blamed a Killer's
psychosis n a childhood spent in front of a TV. What is the matter with TV these days? Is it listening to its own bad PR?)

I think Kindred was made just to be different. It comes from soap czar Aaron Spelling, and surely even he is tired of shows about sex and greed---bloodsucking as a mere metaphor. Here it is a way of life.  But
Kindred turns out to be just too weird and mean, filled with vampire drive-by shootings, rapes, murders, blood. Not my idea of entertainment.

Click Here  To view a scanned image of this article.
 
 

COLUMBIS  DISPATCH
April 2, 1996, Tuesday

Pg. 8C, FINE-TUNING

SPELLING TURNS SOLID FOUNDATION OF 'KINDRED' INTO VAMPIRE TALE WITHOUT BITE

Julia Keller, Dispatch Television Critic

I have a message for Aaron Spelling:

Hands off my vampires.

Spelling, the producer who has cranked out more hours of television than anybody else, has stamped his name on projects involving teen-agers (Beverly Hills, 90210), models (Models Inc.), cruise-ship personnel (The Love Boat), innkeepers (Hotel) and detectives (Starsky and Hutch).

That's just peachy: Spelling can make schlocky nonsense out of those professions, genres and demographic groups till the cows -- and profits -- come home.

With vampires, however, he is treading on the fighting side of me.

Kindred: The Embraced, premiering tonight on Fox, marks the producer's first foray into a territory about which I care passionately.

Vampires are cool, elegant and enticing -- as icons, not as neighbors.

From Dracula (the novel and multiple movies) to Dark Shadows, from The Hunger to Nick Knight (an obscure TV pilot starring Rick Springfield as a vampire detective), vampires have alternately fascinated and repulsed humanity.

Everybody from tweed-wearing scholars to 12-year-olds in T-shirts has tried to figure out why vampires haunt our collective imaginations.

Credit, perhaps, goes to the exotic touches of cannibalism and mysticism, the lure of eternal life, the narcissism of the night.

Vampires feed our obsession with the rich and beautiful -- ever noticed that vampires are always wealthy and gorgeous, never poor and ugly? -- and offer a sleek, omnivorous sexuality.

It was inevitable, then, that an enterprising producer again would seek to spin the most alluring of mordant mythologies into TV gold.

Why -- oh, why -- did he have to be Spelling?

Why not, say, David Lynch (Twin Peaks) or Michael Mann (Miami Vice)?

Unlike those producers, who are equipped with stunning visual vocabularies and an absolute disgust for the ordinary and expected, Spelling revels in the mundane. He thrills to the inane. He embraces the cliched.

Kindred: The Embraced thus wastes its wonderful premise -- rival vampire clans in present-day San Francisco -- on yet another of Spelling's second-rate soap operas, burdened with bad dialogue and clumsy characterizations.

Mark Frankel plays Julian Luna, the handsome, conflicted head of the Ventrues -- the No. 1 vampire family.

Luna's control of the city's clans (much like urban gangs, with infighting and bragging about muscles) is constantly threatened by other ambitious vampires -- a scenario that may remind viewers of the Republican presidential race.

His most dangerous nemesis is Detective Frank Kohanek (C. Thomas Howell), who thinks Luna is just another mob boss who needs to be taken down a peg.

In the premiere, Kohanek and Luna clash when the detective courts a woman who happens to be a former flame of Luna's -- and a vampire to boot, unbeknownst to Kohanek.

In the second episode, reporter Caitlin Byrne (Kelly Rutherford) falls hard for Luna.

The other clans are called Nosferatu, Torreadors, Gangrels and Bujah, embodied by characters with names such as Daedalus and Lillie Langtry. (Bobs or Bills need not apply.)

By the way, kindred do not call themselves vampires'' -- a word coined by outsiders, as the show's press kit explains.

Kindred: The Embraced might be terrific in other hands.

One imagines majestic halls down which swoop lonely, tormented vampires; eerie confrontations between veteran vampires and innocent newcomers; blood-red sunsets that melt into invigorating nights.

Instead, Spelling (and creator John Leekley) gives viewers silly preening by the macho undead.

Everything about the show looks phony -- including the blood, which bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the stuff that squirts out of ketchup packets when somebody steps on them in a McDonald's parking lot.

Why couldn't Spelling have stuck with randy teens or dolled-up detectives? Why did he have to pick on our fang-toothed friends, our coffin-dwelling, blood-swilling buddies?

Spelling has plunged a stake through the heart of the vampire myth.

Only it's not a stake; it's a plastic knife.

SECTION: FEATURES; ENTERTAINMENT; Pg. 3

Clans embrace in blood

BLOODSUCKER vampire heroes masquerade as drop-dead-gorgeous humans in The Kindred.

Five vampire clans live in San Francisco, locked in a Godfather-style turf war.

The most powerful clan is led by handsome, shadowy businessman Julian Luna (Mark Frankel), the character most in debt to Count Dracula. He has a widow's peak in his slicked-back hair and lives in a mansion with gold tasselled drapes.

Another clan is led by a mini-skirted night club owner named Lily Langtry.  The thuggish Brujah clan is led by the muscle-bound Eddie Fiori, who is determined to wrest power from Luna.

In vampire-speak, to be "embraced" is to be turned into a vampire, one of the kindred.

This week, a newly "embraced" former psychiatric patient, Starkweather, is coming to terms with his new-found life as one of the kindred.

Not knowing how to cope with his desire for taking blood, Cash takes him under his wing and teaches him the ethics of blood sucking - such as how he must never take more blood than he needs to survive and that if the blood is taken carefully, the victim will have no memory of the incident.

But, Starkweather's psychiatric history causes him to violate the laws of the kindred, for which the punishment is death eternal.

Pg. 3

The soap opera about vampires living in modern-day San Francisco ends its spring tryout at 9 tonight.

Reportedly, Fox is seriously considering bringing it back next season for the 9 p.m. Monday slot.

Tonight's finale has head vampire Julian (Mark Frankel) taking his human lover Caitlin (Kelly Rutherford) to a cabin in Napa Valley, where he plans to reveal his blood-lust secret. But they are ambushed by hitmen from a rival vampire gang. Meanwhile, human cop Frank Kohanek (C. Thomas Howell) suspects his partner (Erik King) is a vampire.

If that description confuses you, you've not been watching this sexy steamer about a secret society called "The Kindred" and how they operate undercover - and under covers when it comes to sex.

The 1990s finds vampires organized into high-rolling clans. The Brujah are thugs like Al Capone's boys. Gangrels are streetwise hot- heads who travel in motorcycle gangs. The Nosferatu are evil-looking underground dwellers.

Trying to keep the Kindred in line is Julian, a sort of retro Rudolph Valentino. He's played by London-born Frankel, last seen in the James Bond-like series "Fortune Hunter" in 1994.

Also, Julian maintains a tightrope-walking truce with vampire-stalking homicide Detective Kohanek, who's hip to the Kindred game.

These bloodsuckers are caught up in various love stories and power struggles much like the characters on "Melrose Place."

But they can get a little kinky. For example, in need of comfort in one recent episode, Julian spent the night with his dear departed wife, first crawling onto, then seeping into, her grave.

The show is reminiscent of "Dark Shadows" but with a younger, pop-culture, Fox-audience touch.