Miz Shoes has a confession: she has, in less than two hours, become a devotee of DaVinci. Oh, not the maestro I studied in art school, nor the magician in the titular fictions of Dan Brown, but the anachronistic, badly written, desperately acted, beautifully filmed and costumed DaVinci’s Demons on a cable network the name of which escapes me, because I am watching it on the RLA’s iphone routed through the giant monitor that functions as a television.
The writing is execrable. No, calling it execrable is an insult to hacks and shitty writing everywhere. It is anachronistic to a degree that would embarrass a freshman writer in film school—a bad film school. Not only is it bad, it assumes that the audience has the art history knowledge and attention span of a gnat, and utterly incapable of following a plot or remembering relationships. The actors, bless their hearts, each and every one, struggle mightily with dialog that makes George Lucas look like, to be appropriately historic in reference, Shakespeare. While beautiful, the title animation is reminiscent of the title animation in Pillars of Earth. The slow-mo is part kung-fu movie, part Matrix. And yet…
And yet Miz Shoes is compelled by this. During her school years, Miz Shoes spent many an hour in rapt attention to the lectures of William Betch, the best damned art history professor the University of Miami was ever blessed to have on faculty. To see those sketches, as well known and dear to me as family photos, to see them come alive, no matter how thick the cheese crust, is bliss. To see the scale models of his wings, to see, however fanciful and improbable, the test flight… well, Miz Shoes swoons. It doesn’t matter that the character is written to be half Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock and half Peck’s Bad Boy. It doesn’t matter that the Pope’s Nephew and Assassin has done graduate-level work at the School of Bad Robert Downey, Jr. Impressions and Teeth Gnashing. It doesn’t matter that the writing is, well, has Miz Shoes mentioned that the writing is bad? She has? She hasn’t mentioned it enough. But it just doesn’t matter.
When’s the next episode?