After viewing the premiere back in June, it seemed like MTV’s Teen Wolf had plenty of bark but lacked bite, but after seeing the season finale, I have a feeling that statement was made under a personal bias against the supernatural beings genre as a whole, because frankly, the finale was down right awesome. Part of my problem with media of this type – the CW, teen friendly, I-love-you-even-though-you’re-a-monstrous-killing-machine media – is that often times it lacks substance (I know, this coming from the dude with a hard on for Michael Bay). Usually it’s a cheesy, skin deep love story that revolves around a black hole of emotionless nothingness. There’s simply no reason to care about what happens to anyone. And in the first episode, Teen Wolf did have that problem. The very quickly forming romance between Scott and Allison was everything I can’t stand, and it just left a bad taste. But what made Teen Wolf eventually work is that the show grew beyond that romance. It offered more relationships that didn’t even revolve around its main character.

Since last summer MTV has been slowly moving their way back into scripted television, something they stepped out of right around 2000. Their first attempt came in the form of the absolutely terrible The Hard Times of RJ Berger, this was followed by a remake of the hit British series Skins. Unfortunately, while a solid (but ultimately failed) attempt at a remake, the series was met with harsh backlash against its content. The backlash combined with the show’s poor ratings ultimately led to its cancellation this past week. Now here we are, saddled with the network’s latest attempt at scripted drama, Teen Wolf. This may be a re-imagining of the Michael J. Fox film from ’85, but the differences are major. MTV’s version is more of an adaptation in name only, and while the series is fraught with problems (many, many problems), it does show, much like Skins, that MTV is willing to grow on a creative level because this is the network’s best scripted series to date.

The legacy of Michael J. Fox and Jason Bateman are about to be tarnished a bit by the Twilight movement. Or at least, that’s how the history books will remember it — if in fact, it makes it into the history books.