Bitten: A Show About Family (Review)

The family pack of Bitten

WARNING: General spoilers for episode 1 of Bitten are contained in this review.

I know very little about werewolves.  They change at the full moon, silver bullet kills them, that’s about it.  After watching the series premiere of Bitten, I’m finding that, like with vampires, the rules seem to change from series to series.

Bitten is based on a 13 book series by author Kelly Armstrong known as The Women of the Otherworld.  Our main character is Elena Michaels (Laura Vandervoort), a young professional photographer living in Toronto.  The series begins (of course) with her having sex with her boyfriend, Philip (Paul Greene).  While going at it, she feels herself starting to turn, and suppresses it long enough to leave him cold, and get out of his high rise apartment, where she can change in an alley.  The special effects of the change are pretty decent, and the wolf running around doesn’t look bad either, though you can tell it’s CG.

The next day, we find Elena talking to her therapist, Logan (Michael Xavier), confessing that she hasn’t changed in 37 days.  Logan tells her that’s crazy, and that she needs to be changing at least once a week to be healthy.  In this universe, it seems that werewolves don’t only change when there’s a full moon, and can actually change at will.  Logan extends the invitation for them to go running together at night, because he is also a werewolf.

Back in a town called Bear Valley, in Upstate New York, a woman is murdered walking home from a bar one evening on the property of a man named Jeremy Danvers (Greg Bryk).  Local law enforcement come to the conclusion that the woman was attacked by a wolf, who needs to be hunted, and put down.  Jeremy, the leader of a pack, is concerned because he can smell that a werewolf definitely did kill this woman, but it’s not a scent he doesn’t recognize as a member of his pack.

The rest of the episode is spent contacting members of the pack, telling them to come home to Bear Valley to handle this “mutt” wolf on their own, without exposing the existence of werewolves to the world.  Elena and Logan are both members of the pack.  The pack is completed with characters Clayton Danvers (Greyston Holt), Nick Sorrentino (Steve Lund), and Antonio Sorrentino (Paulino Nunes).

Elena is the lone female in this pack.  She also has no interest in going “home” to them.  She goes as far as to say that she doesn’t ever want to change again, which is not an option for a werewolf.  The pack convinces her to return home because she is the best tracker in the pack, and they want to hunt down this “mutt” before anyone else gets hurt.  As of now, this appears to be what the plot of the season will be.  This rogue wolf is “the big bad” of the season, and we are joining the pack on the hunt to find him.

I enjoyed Bitten more than I expected to.  When I think of werewolves, I can’t help but think of the Twilight books/movies, and while Bitten looks like it will definitely have some soap opera-type drama, the prospect of seeing a pack hunt down a bad wolf has me interested enough to tune in for another week or two at least.  I’ve said before that I’ve always thought Syfy’s original scripted programming is stronger than it gets credit for, and Bitten does not appear to be an exception to that at all.  Check it out and let me know what you think.