TV Review: Fire Kill

How you feel about “First Kill” is probably an expectations game. If you were expecting some pioneering, genre-defying, soul-cleansing work of art, well…no. But if you were expecting a campy show about sapphic star-crossed lovers that hasn’t fully embraced its camp potential yet and that you don’t have to turn your brain on too much to watch with, then bingo-bongo is this show for you.

“First Kill” isn’t a great show. But it is occasionally a fun show. And it has hot women smooching which, honestly, can absolve many a show’s sins. We watched it over a weekend and while I haven’t thought too much about it since, I’m happy we gave it a binge.

The series is about as subtle as a pair of vampire fangs. It lays its scene in fair Savannah — not Verona — but the Romeo & Juliet overtones are, well, very overtoney. Like, the young vampire heroine is called Juliette. JULIETTE, GET IT. Her star-crossed Romeo is Calliope, Cal for short and masc representation reasons. Juliette is from a long-line of vampire legacies. Cal is from a long line of vampire slayer legacies. You get the deal.

Honestly, the acting is pretty meh. The matriarchs of both the vampire and vampire hunter clans — Aubin Wise and Elizabeth Mitchell, respectively — are the best actors on the set by a mile of wooden stakes. Everyone else, well, I’m always happy when actors get work.

Sarah Catherine Hook as Juliette and Imani Lewis as Cal are likable actors, but the chemistry between them when they aren’t smooching is, uh, underwhelming. But when they are smooching? Again, I fully embrace my shallowness sometimes.

The plotting could also use work. An extravagant amount of time is used setting up the show’s lore, which could have been better used showing and not telling us how this vamp/vamp hunter world works. And its action is, well, let’s just say Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s fight sequences will look like they’re filmed in fast-forward compared to these.

Yes, I realize I’ve listed a lot of negative things in a row yet still somehow think people should watch this show. But that’s the thing about art. I enjoy all of it — the highbrow, the low-brow and even sometimes the middling. Not everything has to be “Mad Men” or “Breaking Bad” or “The Sopranos” or whatever else male-dominated world critics convince us is Very Important and Thus Good.

Some things can be kinda dumb and kinda fun and, again, hot women kiss and there are also vampires.