Before it launched, I was eager to embrace this show about pretty people doing adventurous and amorous things in pretty scenery — the kind of scenery that led me to move to Vancouver. However, my eagerness faded with the realization that not enough happens to justify the soap genre or the action genre.
My major disappointment in The Guard so far is the lack of drama in plot and character development oddly combined with too much backstory drama spelled out in the dialogue. None of these characters have developed into people I would care about, and yet they demand at every turn that I do.
You know how sometimes you meet someone, and you ask them how they are, and they tell you? They spill about their recent depression, and how their cat just died, and their father never loved them, and they're sure their headaches are a sign of a brain tumour. You know that guy? The Guard is that guy.
Four episodes in, and there's not much more to each character than their one overriding issue that the show can't stop telling us about. What passes for characterization is a catalogue of woes.
So far, there's not much more to Andrew than post-traumatic stress. The pilot episode dealt with the aftermath of a failed rescue attempt, so he was too soon, for too long, sucked into angry, sulky mode before we even got a chance to know him as anything else.
Traumatized by the failed rescue, he can't move past that one event. Unfortunately, that means neither can we. His story doesn't move forward in "When I'm Sixty-Four," either, despite the fact that he half-heartedly attempts therapy. While I hope I'd be more sympathetic in real life, in TV life I think his wife should drop-kick him into the ocean the next time he's sullen or cruel.
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