Secret Diary of a Call Girl • Stocking and Stilettos [4] • Invitation Only [3.5]
Hannah/Belle (Billie Piper) lives a double life and goes to great lengths in an effort to keep her occupational activities private from the company she keeps in her personal life. In the first episodes of this series the audience is privy to a look at the facade that is Belle de Jour, though we aren't given much insight into who Hannah Baxter is, which is, arguably, the more interesting of the two personalities.
While Hannah/Belle has many friends, many acquaintances, there is no one that is commonplace among both of her lives. Surrounded by people, she is still a very lonely person, a solitude created by the job she chooses to keep, and one which she is no longer able to abandon without facing the ramifications of her actions.
Daria • Esteemers [4.5] • The Invitation [3]
Daria's (Tracy Grandstaff) first day in a new school, a new town, offers her the opportunity to shed the image she had had previously and become a brand new person. She can adopt any guise she chooses, but instead decides to remain herself, to ignore a world full of false idols in place of role models and settle into a life wherein she can be herself and surround herself with those that stay true to who they are.
The secrets here belong to Daria's sister Quinn (Wendy Hoopes,) desperate to create an image for herself completely separate from that of her sister, willing to flat-out lie about her familial relations in an effort to avoid appearing in any way uncool.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer • Welcome to the Hellmouth (Part 1) [3] • The Harvest (Part 2) [3]
Having moved to a new town, Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is in the uneasy position of finding a group of friends, and after a stumbling start with mean girl Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter,) Buffy manages to endear herself to Willow's (Alyson Hannigan) crew and wastes no time putting them in the path of danger.
Buffy's big secret is that she is destined to fight the oncoming darkness and beat back the demonic forces that would bring humanity to it's knees, all while maintaining her grade point average. When her identity leaks out to those around her, she takes it upon herself to protect the town of Sunnydale from the evil machinations of the vampiric Master (Mark Metcalf) and put an end to his plot of creating a hell on Earth.
Life on Mars • Blowin' in the Wind [4.5] • Safe House [4.5]
Sam Tyler (John Simm) is forced to introduce himself to an entirely different world when he wakes up thirty years in the past. The city is disjointed and confusing, at once both familiar and completely foreign, and the police work of yesterday is a far cry from the modern techniques he has grown used to.
In trying to familiarize himself with the methods to the past, and to figure out exactly what has happened to him in the present day, Sam is forced to keep quiet about what he thinks his situation is, lest he become ostracized and removed from his post.
Better Off Ted • Being Dynamic at Veridian Dynamics [4.5] • Heroes [5]
New intern Linda (Andrea Anders,) provides protagonist Ted (Jay Harrington) an opportunity to introduce the audience to many of the series concepts without seeming unnatural. Many of the characters here are already familiar with each other and their situations, but every meeting provides a new challenge wherein the cast of characters must create something to sell to the public and find a way with which to introduce it to the buyer's market.
Ted is forced to keep certain information quiet from Phil (Jonathan Slavin) in an effort to convince him to follow through with one of the company's more dangerous efforts, and later must find a way to conceal the fact that he plans to reveal to Phil the ramifications of the plan.
Firefly • Serenity (Part 1) [5] • Serenity (Part 2) [5]
The crew of the Firefly-class ship Serenity brings aboard both a shepherd (Ron Glass) and a young doctor (Sean Maher,) showing them the way of life necessitated by living on a spacecraft. The rules and regulations imposed upon them are, at first, unobtrusive, but when an undercover agent comes aboard in search of fugitives, Serenity's guests realize that Captain Reynolds' (Nathan Fillion) rules are subject to his concern for his crew.
Simon is the secret-keeper here, failing to disclose the fact that his cargo contains the unconscious body of his sister (Summer Glau,) and that he and his sister are the very fugitives that the government is chasing after. While the rest of the crew on board has similar struggles, similar secrets to keep, they all pale in comparison to those of the Tam siblings.
Winner of the Week • Life on Mars
Though it didn't rate as highly as the opening episodes of Firefly, I did find that Life on Mars provided the most enjoyable after the fact, the narrative still stirring in my mind days after having watched the episodes.
Having had the advantage of both running-time and narrative freedom, Life on Mars is set up to be absolutely fascinating, abandoning the notion of a multi-parted opener in favor of separate episodic works and wasting no time in establishing the protagonist's final goal.
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