Magic-themed YTV series clumsy, difficult to watch

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/05/2002 (8589 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

THERE’S this thing about magic — if it’s done properly, it’s amazing, enchanting and, well, magical. If it’s handled badly, it winds up being clumsy, awkward and a bit uncomfortable to watch.

Sadly, the latter is the case with Guinevere Jones, the new YTV series from the creators of The Adventures of Shirley Holmes. The ‘tween/teen-oriented project, which debuts Saturday at 10 p.m. on YTV, seeks to combine the youthful-sleuth adventuring of Shirley Holmes with the magic and mythology of Arthurian legend (an area of storytelling whose popularity has been given a huge boost lately by the Harry Potter empire).

This Canada-Australia co-production, filmed in Melbourne, is overflowing with good intentions and lofty ambitions, but ultimately, it’s the weight of those storytelling aspirations that end up crushing the life out of it.

Simply put, Guinevere Jones — which is co-produced by Winnipeg-based Original Pictures, Vancouver’s Ibis Entertainment and Australian-based Crawford Productions — is a show that tries to be too many things all at once — a mystery, a fantasy, a teen romance and a family drama — and as a result, it succeeds at none of them.

As simply stated as possible, the premise centres around a 14-year-old Canadian girl, Gwen Jones (Tamara Hope, the lone Canuck in an otherwise Aussie ensemble), who has fled to Melbourne along with her Australian-born mother in hopes of escaping some dark, unstated evil. Soon after arriving, her mother is committed to a mental institution and Gwen is placed in foster care.

At about the same time, the strange visions and haunting flashbacks she’s been experiencing start to become more clear. It seems that she’s the most recent reincarnation of Lady Guinevere of Camelot, and now apparently-non-mythical magician Merlin has appeared to inform her that she has magical powers which she must use to combat evil in the 21st century.

With the help of a few new Down Under school chums, Tasha (Greta Larkins) and Josh (Damien Bodie), Gwen must come to terms with her thaumaturgical talents and fight against the evil that has travelled through time to plague the present day.

According to the show’s press materials, subsequent episodes will include a battle with Arthurian sorceress Morgana Le Fay (Mercia Deane Johns), who is responsible for the evil plot that has followed Guinevere through the centuries and across the seas.

It’s only when she has defeated Morgana and her demons, she is told, that she’ll be able to free her mother from the curse that has made her a prisoner inside herself.

It sounds complicated, to be sure, and that’s only the beginning.

In the first two episodes provided for preview, we’re also asked to decipher Gwen’s relationship with her new-agey foster parents, her difficulties fitting in at a school that apparently has its share of cursed teachers, and the sketchy truth about her past life, which is being revealed gradually through a series of dream-sequence leaps through time.

Quite frankly, it’s all just a bit too densely confusing to allow for anything in the way of satisfying storytelling. The preview episodes carry an air of perpetual distraction that makes them hard to follow, even harder to believe and downright impossible to enjoy.

The Adventures of Shirley Holmes, which was shot here in Winnipeg during its popular three-season run on YTV, succeeded because it took a simple device — a curious teenager seeking to follow in her famous relatives’ footsteps — and used it to drive simple, solve-along stories.

Guinevere Jones starts out overburdened with an entanglement of concepts and then trips over itself as it tries to service each of them within its 22-minute episodes.

Whether it’s a feat that’s simply too daunting for series television is a question for producers and scriptwriters; surely, though, it would require more complicated TV magic than a time-travelling wizard, a wand-waving teen and a couple of ancient spells could apply.

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.ca

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