It's still distracting constantly thinking about "where is the camera now" and "this all must have happened a while ago because someone has viewed and stitched together all the footage, even subtitling some of it." (But not all of it - why?)
That latter point is more of a problem than being distracted by cameras in trees or flying around. For the most part, the conceit of fiction is that it's happening NOW. If it's being done in flashback, there needs to be a good reason for it, to compensate for the reduction in dramatic punchiness.
By having this all be "found footage," that conceit is ruined. It's all in the past, everyone is probably dead, so what does it really matter what happens? This show would have been better if they'd just played it straight.
The found-footage stuff might work if more effort were made to make it seem like it
might be real - such as not casting well-known actors like Paul Blackthorne and Leslie Hope in roles, whose presence is constant reminder that this is a scripted drama like any other. They should have either gone more seriously for the idea of making a fake reality show (like
Ghost Hunters, but scripted, well more scripted
) or just dropped the found-footage conceit altogether.
Other than that, I liked this episode - having the characters going blind is a reasonably fresh idea that hasn't been done to death.
Another big drop in the ratings, no surprise, it was obvious last week that this show hasn't caught on. There are only a handful of episodes so hopefully ABC will show them all.
In Week 2, thriller The River (1.7/4) was down 29% from its premiere last Tuesday.
