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eleanorjaneI've been dutifully watching White Collar like a good little fangirl, since it's the Flavour of the Month and since I was very enthused when I heard about it, but I've found that it just hasn't grabbed me like I expected.
I mean, I do enjoy it; I like the cast (although Natalie Morales is woefully underused), and I like the snark and banter. But I'm not hanging out for each new episode, I'm not thinking fannishly about it, I'm not searching out fic and fanworks, and I couldn't work out what was wrong. Why didn't White Collar ring my bells?
And then I realised: it's totally not what I was expecting. I was expecting a caper/heist/con show - both from the way the show had been pimped to me, and from its inclusion as a fandom at![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
thebigstore. Instead, what I got was a buddy cop show. It's cut from the same cloth as Castle, The Mentalist, Bones, and so on - it's a show where the quirky civilian with specialist expertise teams up with a by-the-book cop partner to Fight Crime. Sure, Neil pulls some (very) short cons, but no more than any competent undercover agent, and we never get to really see him do his thing.
And it's good enough in the Quirky Civilian + Straight Cop genre to be enjoyable, but I have other options to fill that niche (specifically Castle, which I love), and it's not what I wanted from White Collar.
So, I'll go on watching, but I'm going to unsubscribe from the fic comms I joined; I've given up waiting for White Collar to push the buttons I was hoping for, because that's not the kind of show it is.
I mean, I do enjoy it; I like the cast (although Natalie Morales is woefully underused), and I like the snark and banter. But I'm not hanging out for each new episode, I'm not thinking fannishly about it, I'm not searching out fic and fanworks, and I couldn't work out what was wrong. Why didn't White Collar ring my bells?
And then I realised: it's totally not what I was expecting. I was expecting a caper/heist/con show - both from the way the show had been pimped to me, and from its inclusion as a fandom at
thebigstore. Instead, what I got was a buddy cop show. It's cut from the same cloth as Castle, The Mentalist, Bones, and so on - it's a show where the quirky civilian with specialist expertise teams up with a by-the-book cop partner to Fight Crime. Sure, Neil pulls some (very) short cons, but no more than any competent undercover agent, and we never get to really see him do his thing. And it's good enough in the Quirky Civilian + Straight Cop genre to be enjoyable, but I have other options to fill that niche (specifically Castle, which I love), and it's not what I wanted from White Collar.
So, I'll go on watching, but I'm going to unsubscribe from the fic comms I joined; I've given up waiting for White Collar to push the buttons I was hoping for, because that's not the kind of show it is.