(Season seven isn't out yet. When I grabbed the six released seasons at Fry's, I figured I was getting the whole series. I didn't find out I was one shy until I got home.)
This was a pretty fun pair of weeks. Every night when I returned from work, I'd wait for it to get dark and I'd watch Crypt episodes until 1AM or so. I quickly worked through the series, which I hadn't seen in (apparently) about ten years. Pretty crazy? There was a bit of nostalgia at play, but I enjoyed the whole set of weeks for the most part.
The second and third seasons are definitely the best, though there are great (and classic) episodes sprinkled throughout all six seasons. At some point during season four, it seems like the show started to rely on more weird and flat-out comedy or silly episodes than it did in the first three. The first three are pretty much all horror with the odd black comedy or blatant comedy thrown in, and the latter half of the show reverses that formula, I'd say. It's a sort of subtle shift, as in you don't notice it as it's happening. It's pretty blatant when you compare, say, an average season two ep to an average season five ep, though.
There are problems with the show, when you look at it all. The show has a tendency to reuse plotlines, changing up the formula, of course, but still variations on themes. For example, there are at least four episodes amongst the six seasons (which is about 70 episodes) that use an evil twin formula of some variety or another. There are at least two episodes that use a genderbending plot. And I'm not saying there are ELEMENTS of an episode's plot, I am saying they are the ENTIRETY of the episodes' plots. That's six episodes, off the top of my head, without thinking about it, that have the exact same twist. Almost a tenth of all the episodes I have watched. There are also at least three episodes that have OMG HE/SHE/THEY WERE SECRETLY VAMPIRES plots where the ending twist is, indeed, that someone was secretly a vampire the entire episode. They do it with werewolves. . .once or twice, depending on if you count one particular episode. It's close enough for me.
But it's hard to blame the show, really. All the episodes are based off legitimate EC comics from back in the day, so they had a limited pool of ideas to work off of. To make it worse, they were modernizing and reheating ideas from approximately 30-40 years before the series was made, in a time when there were no back issues, trade paperbacks, or DVD collections. Of course a monthly anthology from then would reuse ideas. And once this TV series became a sort of banner show for HBO, they had to keep the ball rolling with more seasons, as long as it stayed successful. So they too were stuck with reusing ideas. Yes, I know, quality over quantity. It's no real excuse for HBO, and the channel of today would no doubt have had the series quit while it was ahead, but this was the early 90s, when regular televised content was still a new game to them. It took them some time to find their footing, and they really could have made worse mistakes than the ones they made with Tales.
It's funny seeing the guest stars in their 10-15 year younger forms. Jeffrey Tambor. Demi Moore. The guy that plays Johnny Drama. Arnold. Kelly Preston. Bobcait Goldwait. Miguel Ferrer (twice!). His Twin Peaks alumni bud Kyle Mchlachlan. Lance Henriksen. Steven Weber. The list goes on. That's only like the first two seasons, and since there are only 12/13 eps in a season (aside from the short first season), you can generally count on seeing a recognizable star pretty frequently. Unfortunately, when you weren't seeing someone you recognized, the acting could be, well, terrible, but again, it's campy material anyway, so it still works most of the time.
It was a fun walk through memory lane, and it was neat to see what episodes were from which seasons (I had never seen the show in order). It's nice to see the "trajectory" of the shows quality, and even when an episode wasn't that hot, it was neat remembering an episode I first saw a dozen (in some cases more) years ago. Also, all organic special effects rocks. This show was probably one of the last hurrahs of great gory makeup and plastic monsters. It was probably masturbation material for Fangoria.
It was also doing the intentionally/ironically cheesy thing a full 15+ years before Grindhouse and Snakes on a Plane were glints in their individual directors' eyes. I guess this was one of the first examples of that sort of thing, though I can think of a few potential 70s and 80s precursors, maybe.
