The best guilty pleasure on TV

The campy new TV series Lost Girl makes succubi sexy

After Buffy and Lord of the Rings and Lost, we are all nerds, hungry for the allegorical escapist pleasures that were once solely the domain of basement dwellers and fan convention addicts. So bring on Showcase’s campy fantasy series Lost Girl. The show unpacks the mythology of the Fae, a fractious underworld of folkloric creatures—banshees and goblins and morraghs!—that can pass above-world, too, but are mostly interested in humans when feeling peckish.

The eponymous outsider is Bo, a leather-panted succubus living on what appears to be Queen West. Played by Anna Silk (best known until now as Erica’s same-sex crush on Being Erica and the crazed flight attendant in those NicoDerm ads), the good-hearted bad girl is the oddest of the oddballs, raised by “normals” whose quixotic quest for the truth of her existence puts her in the middle of a brewing battle between Fae clans. And then there’s the sex, which is really what all this mythological body sucking is about. (See: True Blood and Team Edward.) Messing around usually ends badly for Bo, who inadvertently drains the life out of her bed­fellows with a mere French kiss. She’s working on that issue, while pinging between the corners of a lust triangle completed by a shape-shifting homicide cop (Kris Holden-Ried) and a human doctor (Zoie Palmer). There’s a parable in there about the power of a single girl who dares unleash her sexual appetites on the big city or something, but we don’t really care. Not when there’s Pan’s Labyrinth–style effects and delicious wink-wink writing to lend snap to well-trod, bloody terrain.

Lost Girl
Sept. 12. Series premiere on showcase.

(Photograph courtesy of Canwest Broadcasting; Photo-illustration by Wes Duvall)