I’m about three years too late but this show was supposed to be easy viewing for me…but I ended up hate watching the last half of the season due to the foolishness.
Anyway, here’s how to screw up a show as per Twisted.
1.Have a decent plot
When charismatic Danny Desai returns to his hometown after spending five years in juvenile detention, he sees that things are no longer as he remembered them. His mother’s socialite status has plummeted due to his incarceration, and his childhood friends Jo and Lacey have grown apart and are at opposite ends of the social spectrum. Lacey is popular and dating the captain of the soccer team, while Jo struggles to put the trauma of the past behind her. Jo wants to give Danny a second chance, but when she asks for answers about the motive behind his crime, he won’t — or can’t — reveal the information. When a fellow student is found dead in her home, the town spins into a frenzy of suspicion and mystery — with Danny as prime suspect. Jo and Lacey must decide if their childhood friend is guilty or just a victim being persecuted for his twisted secrets.
2. Ignore said plot
Danny, Jo and Lacey are best friends. Keeping that platonic was just a step too far for the writers and we end up with the driest love triangle in TV existence. Jo spends much of the series staring at Danny dreamily, meanwhile Danny hooks up with Lacey in secret because she’s scared that her vapid friends will defriend her if they know that she’s hooking up with a convicted and suspected murderer. The triangle takes a drastic turn when Jo publicly announces that she’s in love with Danny…at his school expulsion hearing.
It was kind of like Supernatural fans using beanie usage as a mark of good character. In the end, Jo ends up with Danny anyway, because everything pretty much revolved around her and her teenage angst. The show is littered with onscreen hashtags for every scene. My personal favourite was #PoorJo….uh, not quite. It was very strange.
3. Remember the plot and proceed to shit all over it
We know two things when the show starts. 1) Danny Desai killed his aunt. 2) His father was presumed dead six months ago.
The second half of the season starts with them fucking that up. It turns out that Danny’s father is involved in the murder of the fellow student. The details aren’t important, it was just stupid. Not only is the father alive but Jo’s mother knew that he wasn’t dead. We barely have time to embrace the absurdity of that before Danny reveals that his Dad killed his aunt and forced him to take the blame. And we barely have time to roll our eyes over that before Danny accidentally kills his father.
Yes, the show managed to kill off the most interesting character for no reason at all.
4. Realize that you jumped the gun and introduce a bunch of random characters
Danny becomes useless after the whole accidental murder thing so they introduce a character called Charlie. And one called Jack. Charlie is a former juve friend of Danny’s and he literally comes to town to steal Danny’s life. Jack arrives under the premises of helping Danny’s mother, Karen, prove that Vikram is alive. Of course, at that point he really is dead so…. Oh and Jack is in love with her. So in love that he collaborates with Charlie to move Vikram’s body and then stage his death to look like he died in a car accident. But wait – twist. Jack is only doing that for the money. Vikram left his $10 million dollar life insurance money to Danny, so, yeah, you’d think that they would consider that but no. Jack allows himself to be arrested for a murder that he didn’t commit, just so he can convince Karen and Danny that he loves them (and their $10 million)…oh and his pretend lesbian (I shit you not) daughter is in on the plan too. Fabulous.
Additionally, Jo’s best friend somehow goes from being in love with her to getting a new girlfriend that we’re expected to care about. The happy couple are afforded a LOT of screen time. Why? I have no idea. Confused? Me too, and I watched the damn thing. Of course, the writers went further and decided to….
5. Randomly get rid of half of the cast and shun one of the main characters.
So, Danny and Lacey hooked up and got together. I was surprised because it was different. Good different. The actors had good chemistry and it wasn’t your run-of-the-mill pairing. Hell, I found myself shipping them and the only thing I usually ship is mail.
That being said, there were some major ship wars, racism and all kinds of nastiness that I think the writers didn’t know how to deal with. Once the original show runner left, it all became predictable. Lacey slowly vanished from the episodes, and eventually broke up with Danny because he ended up ignoring her in order to protect Jo (and coincidentally he killed his father because he was ‘protecting Jo’ #PoorJo).
And apparently, it’s always been Jo and blah, blah, blah, teenage love.
The writers laid it on a bit thick, but at that point it was expected…and all they had left to do was…
6. End with a ridiculous twist and cliffhanger
Jo’s mother’s explanation for not telling anyone else that Vikram was alive was that she owed him. He apparently helped her with a secret baby she had during a temporary split with her husband (who is one of TV’s most incompetent sheriffs by the way).
So she tries to find the baby. The first one she finds is a false alarm. The adoptive couple lost the child. I was kind of like, ‘damn this is kind of harsh for an ABC Family show’. Naturally, that wasn’t her baby. Vikram was so awful that he planted fake adoption papers. In what has to be the most bizarre thing I’ve ever seen, they find the real papers hidden inside a desk. They smashed open the desk and conveniently found the papers.
After that, Charlie (juve kid who wants to steal Danny’s life) snaps shortly after Danny confesses to killing his father. Or well, he snapped before that point and just snapped again. I don’t know. He kidnaps Jo. By the way, he has some kind of tentative relationship with Jo, which is important to know. Danny magically realises that Charlie has Jo and he and Lacey rush to save her. Meanwhile, Jo’s mom (who was initially adamant that her secret child was a girl) learns a shocking secret.
Her secret child is Charlie.
This is revealed as the Sheriff is pointing a gun at Charlie who happens to have a knife pressed against Jo’s throat. We then find out that Charlie’s adoptive mother is Danny’s Aunt Tara. The aunt who he lied about killing in order to cover for his Dad.
….what a reveal!!
Supposedly Charlie deliberately got himself sent to juve so that he could kill Danny for killing his mother. And he also was in love with Jo (his sister…) because Danny talked about her all the time and had a picture of her when they were in juvenile detention together…..
What?!
I was honestly just like, “What the hell is this pure premium nonsense?”
Supernatural aside, I’ve never seen such ridiculousness onscreen.
The screen then goes black and then we hear a gunshot.
You know what would have been a better reveal: THE REASON WHY AUNT TARA WAS MURDERED? There was some rubbish about a company or something but I couldn’t make sense of it.
Season 1B of this show was utterly shameful.
Verdict: 5/10. And that’s only because Avan Jogia is cute. His hair was the onky reason why I finished the show. It is SO PRETTY. And his man bun didn’t even make me shudder and want to scrub myself repeatedly. It was just cute.
supernatural snark 
I’m so glad I read this! I liked this show in the beginning but quit when the reveal about his dad being a live and yadda yadda happened because the show seriously went to shit in the blink of an eye. It’s been on my Netflix list for ages to finish, but I just can’t be bothered. Now I can happily just remove it. Thank you for suffering through the second half for me!!
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The show was at least interesting at the start and it made the downtime before work bearable…and then I reached the point where getting ready for work halfway through an episode was better than finishing it. The reveal about his Dad was fine for me. They set that up by having his body being AWOL so the predictability was expected. Killing him off immediately was such bullshit. Lol. I’m glad to have suffered through the second half on your behalf, haha. I feel like a lot of shows go the same way as Twisted. Can we just limit seasons to 10 episodes already? Sigh… 🙂
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OH MY GOD. Even reading about this show gave me a headache. Lol. I don’t even know what to say, the whole thing sounds like such a confusing mess. I’m torn between a) wanting to witness the bullshit for myself and b) wanting to bleach it’s very existance from my mind.
Your whole post was hilarious though! Were the script writers doing copious amounts of drugs? I don’t know how else this would possibly make sense. Unless it was written, produced and directed by either a famous person or a famous person’s kid, so sveryone around them was afraid to say NO to the bullshit and just let them carry on with the stupidity.
I haven’t truly hate watched anything since my husband got into “Alaskan Bush People” (or “Bush Peeps” as I liked to call it, said in a super fake southern drawl). Fuck did I ever hate that, and I hated it even more after finding out about all the scandal and criminal activity on the part of the family. It was so damned predictable too, season after season you could tell what was going to happen. I’d sit their with my husband saying, “now they’re going to tragically lose yet another boat…Now the POS dad is going to get deathly ill and everyone else will have to do all the work as usual…Now someone is going to run them out of town/the wilderness and it will never be explained…Now they’re going to lose/throw away all their money, again.” and on snd on. And somehow (at least as of when we stopped watching earlier this year) they never addressed the fact that almost the entire family was up on massive fraud charges with like, the US government and the State of Alaska. LOL.
Fucking tv, man.
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Watching it gave me a headache, lol! The last three episodes were just abysmal. I would probably suggest bleaching it from existence because it wasn’t even the good kind of hate watching! It was just frustrating. Haha. They changed track halfway through and basically wanted to make it a cookie cutter ABC Family show…which was impossible because of the first half. Even the script was full of awkward sentences that seemed to get worse after the second half of the season. It was bad writing on steroids.
Lol, I usually hate watch things that I genuinely liked at first. I think the first thing I ever hate watched was Heroes. I was sort of hate watching Big Time Rush (lol) before but now I kind of don’t hate it anymore. 😛
Alaskan Bush People? Lol, I must check it out. It sounds messy af, haha. There are way too many crooks on reality TV! It’s ridiculous. Then again…is it surprising that these people are dumb enough to get on TV while they’re partaking in criminal activity? Reality TV is basically an idiot detector lol!
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Reblogged this on supernatural snark and commented:
For some crazy reason, I’m re-watching this show. Okay, so the real reason is that I watched ‘You’ and the title card reminded me of Twisted’s title card. My brain is weird. Anyway, yeah, EVERYTHING I wrote below still checks out. I probably should have just come back to this post instead. LOL.
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