Ultraviolet

I’m caught up in a sleek, sinister British TV series, Ultraviolet, which serves up its reintepretations of vampire lore in a stark, gritty, and complicated package. American television, for all its boldness with nudity, will never go where Ultraviolet goes.

Ultraviolet’s vampires, like their literary cousins in novels by everyone from Bram Stoker to Anne Rice, suck blood, fail to show up in mirrors, and avoid sunlight. The show goes a step further, though, dragging these old legends into the 21st century. On Ultraviolet, the “leeches” (as the show’s characters call them) can’t be detected by any modern technology (including video, infrared, or x-rays) and can’t be heard on recordings or telephones (so they love faxes and internet chat rooms). “We are,” as one character observes, “the only machines that can see them.”

And, for a show about vampires, you don’t see them that often. The focus is almost exclusively on the human characters — a sort of four-person elite goverment force investigating and fighting the encroachment of vampires on human society. (Cross X-Files and Alias, add a dash of Third Watch or Law and Order, and you’ll be able to imagine something about the tone of the show.)

Stories focus on the dilemmas these characters face as they wrestle with the complex questions raised by the fight against vampirism — referred to only as “Code V”:

– A woman with a husband known to be a vampire appears pregnant, but her sonogram shows a blank, swollen womb. Is she suffering from a false pregnancy, or does she carry a hybrid baby? Should we side with the main characters, who try to force the woman to have an abortion … or with the pro-life advocates who counsel her to protect her unborn baby at all costs?

– A boy at a Catholic school goes berzerk and attacks a kindly priest. Afterward, he has an aversion to all things chuch related and a violent fear of church officials. Is he manifesting the first signs of vampiric infection … or is he a frightened, sexually abused child? And, should he be found out to be infected with Code V, do you tell the media about vampirism … or allow an innocent priest to be convicted as a child molester in order to protech the truth?

– We learn our heroes — a government-sponsored vampire-fighting task force with Homeland Security-style authority — answer, in part, to the Catholic church. The team, in fact, is led by a priest, who asserts, again and again, that the vamipres are evil. What to make, then, of one vampire’s speech: “The Church always uses the label ‘evil’ to maintain the prejudices that keep it in power. They used to say women were evil, and had to be kept in thieir place. They used to say gay people were evil, and that they had to be changed. We’re just the latest in a series of evils — manufactured enemies the church uses to distract you from the truth about itself!”

– In an effort to protect their food supply, the vampires are working on everything from vaccines to artificial blood. We could benefit greatly from their research … but is it ethical to make use of what the vampires discover?

Add to this compelling personal stories for each of the main characters, and you get a genuinely creepy, engaging program that’s got none of the kick-fights, blasting weapons, and simplistic morality of an American show. (You won’t see an American version any time soon, either … the rights were puchased and the pilot produced, but the project was abandoned, and the episode they did shoot will never see the light of day.)

Ultraviolet ran for just one season — eight hour-long episodes — on British television. Watch for it on BBC America, or snatch up one of the hard-to-get DVDs (now out of print, but occasionally available — through Amazon.com and a number of indepentend sellers, including Clyde).