The Gates is a Welcomed Addition to the Genre
The opening scene of the first episode of the ABC drama The Gates features a seemingly innocent housewife trimming the roses outside her suburban home. When a passing truck swerves to miss a little girl crossing the street and crashes into a nearby fire hydrant, the woman goes to assist the injured driver. Despite the fact that there is something “off” about the man, she reluctantly allows him to enter her empty home in order to tend his wounds. But just when one thinks the injured male has sinister plans for the unsuspecting and vulnerable housewife, it is the woman who suddenly spouts fangs and sinks her teeth into the man’s neck.
It is a scenario that has been done before, most notably on the former WB/UPN series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In the opening scene of that show’s pilot, two teenagers break into their high school at night for some adolescent mischief and apparent sex. While the boy exudes confidence, his female counterpart is scared and skittish. The tables quickly turn, however, when the girl turns out to be a vampire and the boy nothing more than her next meal—the scene was thus a way of announcing that Buffy was not going to your typical teen horror series.
The same can also be said about The Gates. Despite the obvious opening homage to the Joss Whedon-created classic, the ABC drama is not Buffy nor does it aspire to be. Although many of the main characters are high school age, for instance, it is their parents that The Gates truly centers around. And while Sunnydale, California, was a small suburban community that radiated innocence despite being built on a Hellmouth, the suburban community protected by two large gates at its entrance is closer to the perfectly manicured lawns of Wisteria Lane from Desperate Housewives than anything on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
On a simplistic level, The Gates and Desperate Housewives share the same basic premise—that despite the tranquility associated with suburban life, something sinister lurks beneath. While Desperate Housewives portrays that underbelly as filled with lies, betrayal, infidelity and other such soap opera traits, The Gates is populated with a more literal sinister underbelly, ranging from vampires to werewolves to witches. A comparison can also be drawn between The Gates and an even older ABC drama, Twin Peaks, which likewise featured a similar tranquil and picturesque community that was not as it initially appeared. Such comparisons, however, are unfair as The Gates is actually something quite different than either of these two predecessors.
Not that The Gates is a uniquely original television show mind you. Its roots are clearly planted in what came before, including the aforementioned Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Desperate Housewives and Twin Peaks. But just as those shows flipped their respective genres upside down, The Gates has likewise does the same. The monsters of the show have not built a private community in order to spread the wings of their monstrosity. In fact, it is quite the opposite—there are rules within the Gates that forbid vampire feeding or werewolf transformation. This is a suburbia built upon privacy and protection from the outside world; the rules are thus in place to keep that privacy and protection secure.
Why would a vampire or werewolf agree to such restrictions on their true nature? The Gates answers the question with a simple word: family. From the vampire couple who have adopted a young child, to the widowed mother raising her werewolf son, to the widowed father caring for his succubus daughter, these residents have chosen to live inside the Gates in order to give their children the most normal life that they possibly can. They may be monsters on the outside but they long to be normal on the inside, both literally and figuratively. The residents on Desperate Housewives and Twin Peaks, on the other hand, appear normal on the outside but are more often than not monsters within.
The same can even be said for the humans in The Gates. Nick Monohan, for instance, is a former Chicago cop who has been hired as the new police chief within the Gates. He brings along a wife and two loving children, as well as a dark blotch on his resume—he shot and killed a suspect during his previous stint in law enforcement. The exact nature of his actions remains murky, but suffice it to say that Monohan is someone who is looking for a fresh start and determined to keep his family safe and protected from the outside world just as much as any of the other parents on the series.
The Gates is also not a slow moving series—storylines that might simmer and plod along for extended episodes on other shows resolve themselves rather quickly on the ABC drama. The end of the first episode serves as a prime example when the dead body of the former police chief is found despite common wisdom that he retired to Mexico. While Desperate Housewives and Twin Peaks have taken such revelations and built entire seasons around such a murder mystery, a prime suspect is identified and arrested in the very next installment on The Gates. Other criminal investigations are also quickly resolved, one way or another, with relative ease. The Gates is definitely not a show that believes in prolonging its mysteries.
The most startling example of this occurs at the end of the fourth episode, when Nick Monohan finally comes face-to-face with a vampire resident of the Gates. “What are you?” he asks, to which he receives the equally simple response, “You know what I am.” While another series may have explored the dichotomy of a human police chief protecting the residents of his community while oblivious to the true nature of those residents, The Gates appears more interested in the aftereffects such a revelation has on that person instead.
While The Gates may indeed contain the DNA strains of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Desperate Housewives and Twin Peaks, the series has woven them together into something familiar yet also quite different. And while it may not be groundbreaking, it is also not merely another “vampire show” created to cash-in on the popularity of the Twilight move franchise or HBO’s True Blood.
Like the guarded community within the physical gates of the series, ABC’s The Gates is not quite what appears to be upon first glance and has evolved into an interesting, intriguing and entertaining television show in its own right instead.
Anthony Letizia (July 26, 2010)
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