Life Unexpected

Season 1 – 60% – When a family relationship drama appears somewhere, narrated at a calm pace, I can't miss it. That's why I was ecstatic after the first episodes of Life Unexpected, thinking I had found a new classic... but later on, my enthusiasm decreased significantly, and towards the end of the season it had almost turned into apathy. And that's a huge shame, because I genuinely like all the main characters without no exceptions. And yet as much as I can root for them, I also find myself shaking my head in every other episode at their strange behavior that doesn't match their previous actions at all and sometimes serves as an unnecessary plot twist. So even though Shiri Appleby looks incredible even ten years after Roswell, I still don't know exactly what to think. Hopefully the second season will come up with some clever twist or idea that will lift the plot from its sleepy mediocrity. Season 2 – 80% – It was worth the wait. It took a little while, but then the creators made a decision – and started writing LUX as a milder version of One Tree Hill (and for those who wouldn't have grasped the connection, they even wrote a crossover). From that moment on, it's hard not to watch a fourth episode after you've just watched three, and I consider the characters really cool despite the ongoing flaws in their behavior. Clearly, the biggest assets are the relationships. Gone are the subtle bonds that I mostly didn't care about, and at last there are situations where I have to passionately root for one couple or the other. The writers even had the courage to extensively develop the relationship between Lux and Eric, a small unnoticed taboo that most teenage series can't resist touching on, but rarely does it ever become anything other than a dead end. It is precisely this pleasantly nerve-racking storyline of forbidden love that will stay in my head from the series forever. At least until the absolute end... Spoiler-ridden P.S. to the series finale: The team that wrote the last episode apparently decided that there was no point in ending as a pleasant family series (even though that's how I perceived the whole thing for the course of two seasons) and literally gambled audience favor on a risky stunt. I usually support such courage, but here I can only shake my head in disbelief. From the final five minutes, I get the feeling that the overarching storyline had been planned for three years and when the television network CW put a stop to it during the second year, they simply added an ending to the last episode of the second season that was originally intended for the end of the third. This insanely unfortunate decision is to blame for the fact that even though the second season led the series to a fourth star, I have to back away from it at the very last moment. Rushed endings should not be written according to the fan's wishes from the first episodes. Otherwise, I simply have no way to explain the final couples that ultimately end up together. (06.12.2011)