John Constantine , Dead on Arrival

Article = none, personal experience

So I got netflix. Watched it for a while , got bored.
Let it lapse, waited a month , got Shomi .
TV series, Constantine , modern day setting , spell caster, fights demons, has an angel for a side kick.

13 really cool episodes. I loved it.
Last episode ... they killed him off.

Oh , they didn't mean to kill him off. Let me explain the stupidity of the situation.
After 12 episodes of some kind of rising darkness, fighing demons and fallen angels and such , they decided, for a change of pace, the charactars would fight an ordinary human. A really evil one , he murdered three little girls and was going for a forth , but still , a normal human.

Rescued the little girl (the other three were already dead, walkin zombie types, no rescue for them) , caught the bad guy put him in cuffs, end of story.

Then the main charactar Constantine , asks his cop friend what would happen if this guy escaped his cuffs and ran. Not gently , not politely , but really pushing it.
So the cop uncuffs him , holds up the cuffs, and tells the pure human villian "run" .
Waits for him to get a few steps away. Shoots him.

Now it's not a matter of gore. You didn't even see the cop fire the gun, they cut to the little girl that had gotten rescued, and they all looked up at the sound of the gun shot.  No blood, no body , nothing. But it was obvious , the cop had shot the evil evil man who had killed three children.

Dear writers ... you just polluted the cop charactar by pulling such a corrupt act. Every cop in the USA is now going to be up in arms over that. Every lawyer , every civil rights worker , every everyone !  Also , because the main charactar was pushing , and it was obviously the main charactars idea from the get go ... you polluted the main charactar as well.

The series was cancelled. There was no 14th episode.

I am aware that this charactar came from the comics. I am aware the comics can have some fairly nasty "good guys" . I recall a charactar named Lobo who was as strong as super man , and routinely killed random people and laughed at them for being weak.  But TV is not comics. You can't do that in the TV medium. It doesn't matter that TV is dying (and being replaced by services like netflix and shomi) . It doesn't matter that the usa police are routinely in the news for shooting blacks and wow someone should do something about that wouldn't it be neat if some comic charactar went on a revenge spree ? You can't do that on TV.  It has it's own rules it's own genre. After 50+ years of television , like it or not agree with it or not , you have created a social contract between the TV producers , and the TV consumers. And a stunt like that breaks the rules.

If you ever have any hope of writing for TV or a TV like medium (3D virtual reality is coming , soon everyone will be making their own low grade TV shows at about the quality of online games such as world of warcraft) if you ever intend to get your story big ...

The good guys , are the good guys. And the bad guys , are the bad. And there is no in between. It doesn't matter if the good guy has shades of grey and is on the road to redemption.  The good guys don't murder their already captured bad guys.  That is an act of profound evil , they're not good guys anymore.

Once they're captured, especially in the united states, the death penalty is for the state to decide, not the vigilante on the street. The vigilante should stick to fighting the demons (Constantine) or the vampires (buffy the vampire slayer) and stay the heck away from the mere mortals.