Do you like Buffy the vampire slayer? well so does Patrick Ness as Class is pretty much a British knock off. Do you like the most basic archetypes? well so does Patrick Ness as Class contains the most boring, simple characters types we've seen in every piece of college fiction written in the past 30 years. Do you like relatable characters? No? Well good because pretty much everyone in Class is unlikable to the point where I'm not sure I want the episode to be resolved, if the villains of episode one won I really wouldn't care. Our "hero" is a somehow simultaneously an alien prince slave owner and the most boring man on the planet, his or ours. The rest of the cast are all really boring stereotypes, the jock, the nerd, the kind one. All brought together in a really forced way. This is Patrick Ness's first TV project and it shows with characters dancing around flashing neon exposition and jokes so clunky you can literally hear the thud as they fail to land. Characters are vain and have ridiculous leaps in logic such as April, a girl with so few defining character traits I actually forgot she was on the team, April is attacked by a "Shadow-kin" and, after being rescued we get the back story of our "hero" and her response "We're going to have to cancel prom", now in Buffy that would be the joke the scene ended on but no we continue on making the character just look insane and insensitive to the fact the person who saved her life just told her about how his planet died. No one would act like this, and that's my main problem, these characters are really fake, they're not what actually teenagers are like, they are what a group of writers and executives think teenagers are like, what they think will appeal to them. I should know, I'm in my second year at sixth form, I'm the target audience for this and all I'm seeing is a group of target psychographics flailing across a screen for 50 minutes. And don't even get me started on deus ex machina, the Doctor, the title character of the series the show spun off from is reduced to nothing but a get out of jail free card appearing to fix the problem and then leaving twice! This leaves the writer with the problem that they now have to write around why they can't just call the Doctor every time now. But I believe this series doesn't respect its roots in using the Doctor as nothing more than a tool, but that's just me.
That being said this show does a have some redeeming qualities, Ms Quill for one is the break out character of the show, she's by far the most memorable and interesting but even she is restricted by poor dialogue. The story is basic, a twist on the riches to rags story so it can't really go to wrong. The VFX both practical and digital are spectacular rivalling even Doctor Who for some of the best I've seen on British TV in a long while so its got that in its corner. All in all I believe this series is bad, but not irredeemable, its the kind of thing I would check back with next season as the rest of the season is written by Patrick Ness so little chance of the series changing direction at this point. Give the series a try if you're in the UK as its free on Iplayer and make up your own mind.
That being said this show does a have some redeeming qualities, Ms Quill for one is the break out character of the show, she's by far the most memorable and interesting but even she is restricted by poor dialogue. The story is basic, a twist on the riches to rags story so it can't really go to wrong. The VFX both practical and digital are spectacular rivalling even Doctor Who for some of the best I've seen on British TV in a long while so its got that in its corner. All in all I believe this series is bad, but not irredeemable, its the kind of thing I would check back with next season as the rest of the season is written by Patrick Ness so little chance of the series changing direction at this point. Give the series a try if you're in the UK as its free on Iplayer and make up your own mind.