The adventures of condom-hand man.
Oh, come on – you thought it, too. This kid has a condom growing in his hand.
Zetman was… well, I’d heard people say it was boring, but I would argue that its main offense is that its outrageously stupid. The lead kid doesn’t know what ‘death’ is, or what ‘hope’ is, despite being ten years old… and being homeless. Huh? Sure, sure, he has a caretaker (who I predicted would die the moment I set eyes on him), but that hardly excuses him having no familiarity with death! He’s a streetkid, for fuck’s sake!
The stupid doesn’t stop there, either. Admittedly, a lot of it is small, and in other shows it’d be easy to look past it, but when taken in such mass it becomes something unavoidable. The show is silly, and its tone is too serious to be able to take it as tongue-in-cheek. Zetman thinks its a show saying a lot about the cruelness of the world (rich man forbidding his chillens from playing with a poor kid because of appearances? check. doctor who refuses to treat an old man because he has no money? check.), but it attempts to do so in such an obvious and idiotic fashion that its like being smacked upside the head with it. As far as Zetman is concerned, subtley is just over-rated.
On the plus side, since I’ve been so negative thus far, the ED is actually decent; the foot-tapping’s a nice touch. Additionally, the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold character, while not quite original, is nevertheless likeable. Too bad the show decided to dip its toes into the waters of weird pedophilia-ish-ness with an awkward bath scene ending in an over-the-top crying fit.
There’s a whiff of potential future homoerotic tension in the next episode preview and in the fact that the evil rich dad breaks his son’s cellphone to prevent him from being able to be friends with him homeless buddy, but its hardly enough to persuade me to give Zetman another chance. There are too many fish in the sea to keep bothering with the crappie crappy ones, after all.
GAR GAR Stegosaurus 
I won’t “defend” this show as much as I think I know how to approach it. This show is like those comics in Heavy Metal Magazine: exploitative, violent, had nudity, and are puerile as they come. They’re exploitative spectacles and this is the feeling I got watching this show.
Now, I don’t regard comics in Heavy Metal Magazine highly at all, and I can hardly remember a single one, but I remember reading them and enjoying them in a fashion.
Honestly, I wouldn’t have as much of an issue with its trashier/potentially trashier elements, except that the entire thing is just so overwrought and seems to have a pretty high opinion of itself. Its too ridiculous.
haven’t seen this, but can we please throw the “Hooker with a Heart of Gold” trope in the fucking trash, already? it’s not awesome or progressive, it’s fucking misogynist; in order for this trope to work, you have to assume that people think that (female) sex workers are regularly terrible people. blek.
Hmm, I suppose in Zetman’s defense, we could just argue that Zetman thinks 95% of people are horrible, horrendous people, regardless of their involvement or lack thereof in sex-related work.