Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.5
Overall		3.0

Being Human: The Complete Third Season Blu-ray Movie Review

Becoming tedious.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman January 10, 2014

It’s almost always a crapshoot as to what roommates or housemates you’ll end up with at a certain period in your life, a tendency perhaps only exacerbated by such online sites as Craigslist (as evidenced by the seemingly nonstop array of co-tenant lawsuits that populate such shows as Judge Judy). While outsiders might think of the three main characters on Being Human as their personal worst nightmare in terms of having to live with any and/or all of them, the trio themselves probably count themselves lucky that they’ve found other “outcasts” with whom to share their decidedly unusual fates. Being Human is a North American revision of an extremely popular British series, but, while popular, seems to have not attained quite the same cult status as its English sibling. The show continues to mine the adventures of a vampire, a werewolf and a ghost with some decent enough plots and halting (almost soap opera tempo) character development, but increasingly the series seems to be coasting, attempting to invigorate its already dense mythology with some new characters as well as returning folks from previous seasons. Being Human picks up its third season quite a while after last season’s cliffhanger ending (this series has exploited cliffhangers quite a bit, something that’s actually made part of a featurette supplementing this latest season’s Blu-ray release). As a matter of fact, it might even be argued that the second season of Being Human ended with several cliffhangers, which may be the single biggest clue about a certain desperation that increasingly creeps into the show as the third season trundles along, as if the writers aren’t quite sure what they want to do with the by now incredibly convoluted and interwoven fabric of various plot threads. The series is to be commended for not aping its British progenitor like a Xerox copy, but at the same time, it hasn’t really pushed the boundaries in any meaningful way itself. As with the two previous seasons, the show still offers a refreshingly insouciant sense of humor which at least lets the audience know that it isn’t taking itself too seriously, but there’s a certain accrued weight to the show by now that keeps dragging it down from the ebullient highs of the first couple of years.

Note: It’s next to impossible to discuss some of what happens in this season of Being Human without posting a couple of spoilers, though I’ll try my best not to divulge too much. Those who haven’t been introduced to the series or who haven’t been keeping up with it may want to revisit our reviews of the first two seasons:

Being Human Blu-ray review

Being Human Blu-ray review

It’s to this show’s credit that things are shaken up fairly radically as the third season begins. The second season ended with all three of the main characters, werewolf Josh (Sam Huntington), vampire Aidan (Sam Witwer) and ghost Sally (Meaghan Rath) facing fairly drastic crises, all three of which could have spelled demise in one form or the other, despite the fact that Aidan supposedly can’t die and Sally is already dead. The third season takes a couple of episodes to fully resolve these cliffhangers, and without posting too much information, two of the characters come out of their travails in radically altered form (for those who have kept with the series, the very fact that I’m discussing all three of the characters being reconstituted is a major clue as to what happens to at least one of them).

The show’s humor is still mostly intact as well, giving a nice, acerbic edge to many episodes, especially when violence breaks out and the characters almost seem compelled to bandy witticisms. But the third season is at least a bit more lethargic than the first two simply due to so many subplots being explored. Some of these, like Liam McLean’s (Xander Berkeley) saga as he searches for his children, have some interesting twists and turns, but with the glut of characters showing up in this show, it can almost seem at times like a flowchart is necessary to keep the competing interests organized. Even the Liam arc becomes fodder for more faux danger as the season progresses and his story interweaves with both Aidan and Josh.

And in fact it’s this soap operatic aspect that continually trips up Being Human in this third season. This is probably nowhere more evident than in the still burgeoning relationship between Josh and Nora (Kristen Hager). Anyone who’s watched this version of Being Human from the beginning will already know that this couple has had its ups and downs, but those are pushed to almost ridiculous extremes this season, including yet another round robin of morphing forms as the season comes to a close. With a stronger emphasis on the sly comedy and some less hyperbolically dramatic tendencies, Being Human can probably regain some of the momentum it loses this season. It’s too early to say this show has jumped the shark, but it might be time for all three of these housemates to start perusing Craigslist for some other alternatives.

Being Human: The Complete Third Season Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Being Human is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Entertainment One with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. This digitally shot series continues to look very nicely sharp and well detailed on Blu-ray, though this season is perhaps a minor step down in quality, if only incrementally. That may be at least in part due to the increased use of CGI, which in this series has always tended to have a slightly soft quality. Colors continue to be just slightly pallid, per the previous seasons, though some of the more gruesome elements pop quite nicely. As with previous seasons, the various directors sometimes play with various techniques (see the fisheyed view of Josh in the second screenshot for a good example), sometimes pushing contrast so that whites bloom, or intentionally desaturating the image beyond even its normally kind of pale appearance. Despite these effects, the overall look of Being Human is very precise and clear looking, and remains almost entirely free of artifacts, save for a few transitory issues like minor banding.

Being Human: The Complete Third Season Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Being Human continues to offer a nicely consistent sounding DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 experience on all the episodes of this season. The show still tends to only fully exploit the surrounds with some of its fanciful sound effects, which regularly append scenes of mayhem or transformation. Dialogue is always very cleanly presented and some of the source cues utilized in the series offer some surprising low end. Fidelity remains excellent throughout this season, with wide dynamic range and no damage of any kind to report.

Being Human: The Complete Third Season Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Behind the Scenes Featurette (1080p; 47:34) is a bit longer and more in-depth than many of these EPK- fests, but it's also about as generic as its title. There is some fun footage showing the chaos surrounding some of the location shooting.


• Comic Con 2013 Panel (1080i; 49:22) is plagued by a bit of video noise in the darker shots (mostly of the audience). Panel participants include Anna Fricke, Kristen Hager, Sam Huntington, Meaghan Rath, and Sam Witworth.


• Bloopers (1080i; 8:05) is kind of strangely authored, with a couple of episodes' bloopers lumped together into three separate "chapters" which play successively. There's no way to isolate any individual featurette, nor any "Play All" option (which is basically what this supplement defaults to, anyway).


• Cliffhangers (1080i; 1:32) talks about this season's ending.

Being Human: The Complete Third Season Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Being Human starts out its third season pretty strongly, with three (actually four if you include Nora) interesting developments which resolve in one way or the other the cliffhangers from last season. But there's no real suspense here, either—we know going in that the show is not going to jettison one main character who seems to be in peril, and anyone with any sense is going to realize that another character, who seems to be radically changed at the beginning of the season is going to "revert" to old ways by the season's end. Making all of this all the harder is the series' increasing tendency to both stuff episodes full of tangents with frankly too many characters to keep track of or at the very least to really care about. That tendency is offset somewhat by the continuing exploitation of a kind of dark but often quite funny sense of humor. I'm not quite ready to write off Being Human yet, but I'm getting a bit closer. That said, this third season, while on the edge, still is enjoyable enough to come Recommended.