Very Influential Show

I hadn't seen this since I was a kid and they reran it on the Syfy channel (then Sci-Fi) way back when. But a friend leant me a copy and I had a nostalgic blast with this.

This was a very uneven show that had both good episodes and bad episodes. And then there was "Love & Curses" (but I at least enjoyed the "Bride of the Wolfman" episode of that run just for it all its fun homaging). But what surprised me is how ahead of its time it was. The idea of exploring supernatural creatures in a procedural type show would get big a few years later with "The X-Files." And while the latter was deadly serious and SWOL was a campy Moonlighting/Remington Steele-esque dramedy, it is still a related idea.

However, what it really foresaw was this stuff of horror movies of old (werewolves, vampires, ghosts, zombies, etc.) coming back in a major way in popular culture as something to be campy and cloyingly self-aware about. This show, while it stumbled often in balancing its light and dark tone, was a precursor to the much more deft hands of Joss Whedon and his own "Buffy the Vampire" TV series. It's just the focus of that was more vampires than werewolves and he literally had a "Scooby Gang" as opposed to the sexual tension of a man and woman pair leading the show. And now you have shows that just don't imply nudity and sexuality with these creatures, but fully exploit it in a winking, over-the-top way like HBO's "True Blood." When you factor in other shows like "The Vampire Diaries," "Supernatural," "Fringe," and "Teen-Wolf," you see how ahead of its time the show was.

Not all of these shows are of equal quality and some are better than SWOL and some are actually worse, but this show figured out this idea before audiences were ready. And when it worked (like the zombie two-parter or the horseman episode or the fragrance or pilot episodes) it worked very well. Sadly, it went to Hollywood and died before its sense of humor would catch on.

Just an interesting thought.