Interactive Television

Some shows, which I sometimes call “Quality Television,” demand full attention and concentration.  Others are best as “background television,” best enjoyed while working, cleaning, cooking, writing, or being otherwise productive.  But a very special breed of shows demands a more active version of watching—a version that involves talking back to the television.   Pointing out the absurdity of the characters’ actions.  Pausing to ask, “so let me get this straight.  Is this really what’s happening?”  These shows are Interactive Television.

I have a couple of friends I often enjoy interactive television with.  (Glasses of moscato and bowls of ice cream are optional, but recommended.)  For a long time, our interactive favorite was Merlin.  It was perfect:  pretty and well-made, charming, but deeply silly.  Its characters made wonderfully illogical decisions.   The show’s drinking game wrote itself:  drink every time someone stares portentiously out a window.  Every time a character watches someone sleep.  Every time the characters come up with the least direct plan possible and/or put only half effort into some life or death situation.  Every time a character demands “proof” of a self-evident fact.  Etcetera.  Then came Tower Prep, a show whose premise (I described it as “Hogwarts meets The Prisoner”) was truly inspired, and which had flashes of absurdist brilliance, but ultimately could be boiled down to, as one friend described it, “We care more about competing in an intramural tournament for a made-up sport than we do about trying to understand why we’ve been kidnapped from our parents’ homes and brought to this mystery prison.”  Then came Zero Hour, a work of absolute interactive brilliance that had to be experienced to be believed.  (Seriously.  Seek out Rob Bricken’s reviews of the show on io9 if you doubt.  And the show got SO MUCH CRAZIER when they burned off the remaining episodes, after Bricken's reviews ended. It was a true masterpiece.)  So when that ended, we wondered what would come next.

                                                                                                                                                        

We tried Sinbad, but it didn’t quite have the interactive alchemy—to work, a show has to be just a little bit bad, and Sinbad was just a little too bad.  Interactive shows have to be good enough for you to want them to be better.  If they aren’t that good, then they’re just bad.  And truly, deeply bad shows don’t work for interactive television:  making fun of those is like kicking someone when they’re down.  So it’s a delicate balance—an interactive show has to be good enough that you care enough to make fun of it, and bad enough to have something to make fun of.  It has to take itself seriously—otherwise, it does the mocking all by itself—but it has to have enough lightness to keep the moscato-fueled mood alive.  And it has to have a sort of twisted internal logic that couldn’t possibly function in the real world.  It’s a tough task.  Sleepy Hollow has filled some of the interactive void, but our real find this year was Witches of East End, reviewed below.  And I just knew that Atlantis would be good interactive fodder.  I haven’t tested it with my friends…but now that I’ve watched the pilot, I totally will.

Witches of East End (Lifetime, new.  Supernatural drama.)

Watched: first three episodes

Premise: A family of women practice witchcraft and face supernatural dangers in a modern-day coastal town.

Promise: In the first five minutes of the pilot, the following things happen:  A mysterious woman draws a symbol on the ground, glares at two preppy neighbors, and kills them on the spot.  A young woman accidentally casts a spell that makes her mean mother-in-law-to-be choke on a canapé.  (We still, three episodes in, don’t know if the mother-in-law survived.)  And the same young woman, who by the way is engaged to a man unironically named “Dash,” reports that she had a sex dream about a dark, handsome stranger…whereupon that stranger walks into the engagement party.  Really, that’s pretty much all you need to know about this show.  Well, I should mention the crazy aunt:  sometimes she’s Madchen Amick, and sometimes she’s a cat.  Don’t get me wrong:  there is real mystery and danger afoot, and real romantic tension.  And in all seriousness, it’s nice to see a show populated mostly by competent (if insecure) women.   But mostly it’s hard to be serious about this show.  It is deeply silly, but it has an undeniable charm, as if the characters are just having fun being themselves. 

Verdict:  Interactive television.

Atlantis (BBC America, British, new to U.S..  Fantasy.)

Watched: Pilot

Premise: Modern young man is marooned on the lost island of Atlantis, which is sort of like Ancient Greece.

Promise:  This is produced by the same folks as Merlin, and it has many of the same charms and flaws.  But after several seasons of moscato and Merlin, I have a deep affection for cryptic prophecies, bromance, unpredictable combining of magic and science, mangled mythology, inappropriately sassy princesses, and the sort of "whimsy" that comes with its own woodwind music.  Again, most of what you need to know can be summed up in one scene.  After our hero lands smack-dab on top of a new guy, they both brush themselves off, and have the following exchange.

Hero: "Where am I?"
New guy: "You're in Atlantis."
Hero:  "Atlantis...as in the lost city of Atlantis?  As in the mythological city under the ocean?"
New Guy:  "Why do you say lost?  And how could a city exist under the ocean?  Surely everybody would drown."
Hero: "Either I'm dreaming, or I'm hallucinating....or I'm dead.  Am I dead?"
New Guy:  "No, you're very much alive, although I think you're delirious.  I'm sorry, I'm forgetting my manners.  I'm Pythagoras."
Hero: "Pythagoras?  You're joking.  You're the triangle guy."
New Guy:  "How did you know I've been thinking about triangles??" 

As in Merlin, there's a hero and his buddies, and a rebellious princess, and a seer who refuses to be straightforward about anything.  And a king played by a genre celebrity—this time, it’s Alexander Siddig rather than Anthony Head, but you get the idea.  It’s still not clear to me what makes our hero, Jason (as in “and the Argonauts?”  Hard to know) special, but he’s the sort of accidental hero we’ve become accustomed to.  So overall…silly, and charming.  Which makes it:

Verdict:  Interactive television.

On the DVR:  Nothing new, but that's only because I owe a few Simon Bakers.  And never fear, more new TV coming in January...which is not very long from now!

The Limitations of the Limited Series

One industry trend at the moment is the “limited series.”  Limited series are, basically, miniseries:  self-enclosed stories designed to travel a complete arc in a limited number of episodes—generally somewhere between three and fourteen--but (at least as they're being done lately) with the possibility of being renewed for further series.  I can see the appeal:  networks have gaps to fill in their regular season, and considering the rise of the DVR and various non-network entertainment delivery mechanisms, they aren’t seeing the same results with reruns that they used to.  So they find limited series to fill the gaps between seasons, and if the limited series are successful enough, they renew them into the next gap, or a full season.  They can get bigger stars (and often bigger production values) because they don’t have to commit to longer runs.  They can market them as “events” that draw in viewers.  Perhaps the biggest success in this vein lately was Under the Dome, which got renewed to series.  The Following is another that got renewed.  I believe Sleepy Hollow was also conceived as a limited series, which helps explain why it started with such ridiculously high stakes:  It didn’t leave room to build because it didn’t anticipate building.  Once Upon A Time In Wonderland has aired during the regular season, but it's basically a limited series as well.

But while I see the appeal, I’m also disappointed by the trend. Limited series undermine much of what I find compelling about television as a genre:  the fact that because television is open-ended, it needs to incorporate overlapping story arcs of varying sizes, and and the fact that its characters can grow into lives and complexities that start to approach those of real people.  These are among the key advantages of television over feature film as a storytelling medium, and when a show is designed to be self-contained as a limited series is, even if it retains the option of expanding into that sort of storytelling, it still gives up something.  I’m not saying that limited series – or miniseries, for that matter – can’t be wonderful stories with complex characters.  Many are.  But I’d hate to see them become the way we conceive of television.

The Paradise (PBS, British, new to U.S.. Costume drama.)

Watched: entire first season

Premise:  In 1870s England, a country girl moves to the city and gets a job at an extravagant department store.

Promise:  I believe this is one of those shows that started as a limited series and has been renewed for a second run, but only the first series has aired.  The show is based on, and as far as I can tell hews quite closely to, the arc of the Emile Zola novel Au Bonheur des Dames.  Like many other British costume dramas, it’s very, very pretty.  And it follows a recent trend in British import TV that I find appealing:  it focuses on a collection of women rather than a collection of men.  (See, e.g., Call the Midwife and The Bletchley Circle.) And there is a bit of Call the Midwife in this, although here the women are shopgirls working with the idle rich instead of midwives working with the desperate poor, and instead of being independent women seeking to help other women find independence, the characters here are independent women desperately seeking to relinquish their independence to the men around them.  So…less appealing, at least to my taste.   On the good side, the show does an excellent job of highlighting many of the problems in late-nineteenth-century class and gender dynamics, and centers around a capable, creative, and competent woman; skewers the superficiality of class distinctions; and poignantly portrays how class acts as a cage (albeit a gilded one).  On the bad side, it casts a deeply uncritical eye on the male lead, a manipulative man who believes he can take financial and emotional advantage of women.  This is, I believe, an artifact of Zola’s source material, but considering the liberties that this adaptation has taken with its source (moving it to England from France, for one), I’d have liked to see some of the story’s progressive values incorporated into the romance.  It shouldn’t have been so hard.  That said, the story pushes along engagingly, and I watched the whole thing, so how bad could it be?

Verdict:  Worth Netflixing, if you like costume dramas.

Mob City (TNT, new.  Crime Drama.)

Watched: 2-hour pilot

Premise:  A cop straddles the line between good and bad in Mob-soaked 1947 Los Angeles

Promise:  I really enjoy noir.  Characters in noir follow their fundamental natures down the road to their inevitable doom with a sort of moral relativism that makes even a happy noir ending feel like a trap.  A good noir mystery is a thing of beauty.   This series is clearly steeped in noir conventions, so much so that it’s as much about getting them right as it is about telling its story.  And that’s where it falls short: 

the dialog follows noir cadences so faithfully that it loses its meaning, and the surface of the story is so shiny with noir sheen that it never shows its emotional heart.  And in so doing, it loses one of the best elements of noir.  The best noir isn’t about people who don’t feel—it’s about people who feel too much.  So much that they can’t help but have rough edges.  Here, the characters are trapped in their nourish ruts, but the emotions that got them there, and the rough edges they should catch along the way, are nowhere to be seen.  The result is pretty, but shallow.  It tells the “true” story of Bugsy Siegel and his cohort, based on a nonfiction book by John Buntin.  It’s got no shortage of sly dames and hidden machine guns in and hazy neon signs reflected in the puddles of alleys that are too quiet and too clean.  And the characters are following their fundamental natures into what will surely become their inevitable doom.  But I would like to see it embody noir’s principles with the same emotional dedication as it performs its conventions.

Verdict:  I’m on the fence about whether to watch the rest, but I probably will.  (After all, it’s in my fundamental nature, whether inevitable doom resides there or not.)

On the DVR/Unreviewed:  Lucky 7 (canceled), Sean Saves the World, Witches of East End, Ground Floor, Atlantis, and Kirstie.  There will not--as far as I know--be any new shows airing between now and the start of the new year, but stay tuned to this space for reviews of the remaining Fall/Winter shows, and some discussion of the season in review.

Reality and Likeability

One common critique of reality TV is that it isn’t “real”: although it purports to be about real people’s lives, it’s actually highly manufactured and engineered to generate distinct characters and narrative structure.  Since actual humans are generally more complex than distinct characters, and actual life is generally a good deal more meandering than a television audience will tolerate, the result of this manufacturing and engineering bears little resemblance to “reality.” I don’t particularly share that objection—I’d much rather watch something designed to entertain than something genuine and boring.  But a surprisingly large number of reality shows mistake “designed to entertain” for “focusing on unlikeable people.”  And this is truly mystifying to me.  These shows have an audience, so perhaps I’m just not the target market.  But that makes me wonder:  what is it in the zeitgeist that makes people want to watch shows about unlikeable people?

When I say “unlikeable,” I’m not talking about people who do bad things or people who make bad choices.  I understand why those people are interesting.  There are a lot of really wonderful shows out there about criminals and screw-ups.  Mostly, I’m referring to narcissists—people who are so self-absorbed and insecure that they wouldn’t know “well-meaning” if it smiled and waved at them.  There are a surprising (to me, at least) number of shows about these people, and about how they have no sense of how their actions affect the people around them.  I suppose there is some amusement value to laughing at the un-self-aware and remarking on their ability to delude themselves.  I'm not too proud to admit I find that funny too.  But to style these people as heroes?  It’s never quite made sense to me. 

What’s even stranger to me is how many shows seem to mistake unlikeability for realness.  It's not just reality shows, although many of them are staged and edited to highlight these characters.  (Without them, we certainly wouldn’t have “The Bad Girls Club” and it’s ilk.  We probably wouldn’t have the Spencer & Heidi shows, or even the Kardashians.  Heck, we’d barely have “America’s Next Top Model,” which is at least supposed to be about competent people doing what they do well.)  I don’t mean to say that the real world doesn’t have loathsome people in it.  I’m sure everyone has known a deluded narcissist or two.  I certainly have.  But I, for one, want to get away from those people when I plunk down in front of the telee.  I don’t want to see more of them.   Or perhaps I do--but if I do, I at least want to see something that has some critical distance from them.  

It’s not that I want everyone on television to be likeable.  I just want not to have to applaud or admire people for that unlikeability.  And that goes for fiction as well as “reality.”

To wit:

Ja’mie: Private School Girl (HBO, Australian, new to US.  Sitcom/mockumentary)

Watched: pilot

Premise:  Mockumentary about the ringleader of a bunch of rich mean girls who attend a private girls’ school in Sydney.

Promise:  I actually couldn’t find anything redeeming about this show, about a bunch of mean, narcissistic, self-satisfied, classist, racist, sizeist (etc.) girls.  The show and its main character are the brainchild of Chris Lilley, a (male) Australian comedian who plays the main character (in drag).  It is, apparently, the third series about its main character, although I wasn’t familiar with the forst three.  There’s virtually no plot—it just follows the girls through their jargon-filled, disrespectful, self-congratulatory day.  I’m surprised it’s even possible, but it’s true:  these characters are more offensive than those on reality shows about offensive people.  I presume it’s supposed to be a parody of those shows, satirizing the extreme version of privilege it portrays.  But just because something is satire doesn’t make it watchable.  I don’t think I’ve ever disliked a show this much.

Verdict:  I want that half-hour back.

Adam Devine’s House Party (Comedy Central, new.  Stand-up comedy.)

Watched: Pilot

Premise:  Standup comedy with a house party framing mechanism.

Promise:  I love good stand-up, and Devine is a funny guy who often generates humor through self-humiliation.  This show is a pretty extreme version of that:  the premise, as he describes it, is that Comedy Central gave him a bunch of money to make a standup comedy series, and he blew all the money on an enormous house party.  So the show is clips from the party, alternating with standup sets presented on an outdoor stage by comics who are (we are meant to assume) Devine’s friends.  The party bits are amusing, but smack of class-clown desperation.  The comics’ sets, at least in the pilot, trend toward crude or sexual humor.  It’s not bad, but not quite my cup of tea.  I think—and perhaps I shouldn’t be embarrassed to admit this, although I am—I prefer my standup to have its brows just a tiny bit higher than this.  I’m not asking for erudition…but it doesn’t seem like that much to ask for more than straight men making jokes about gay stereotypes.  Of course, the show’s enjoyability will depend heavily on each comic’s set—but based on their choices in the pilot, at least, they may be intentionally choosing comics with frat-boy sensibilities.

Verdict: I think I’m not the target audience.

Naked Vegas (SyFy, new. Documentary.)

Watched: First few episodes

Premise: Although the show is advertised in conjunction with Face Off, it’s really much more in line with other documentaries like LA Ink or Ace of Cakes.  The show focuses on a body painting company (called “Naked Vegas” that paints clients for shows and special occasions.  It highlights the painters’ artistry, business challenges, personalities, and interactions with clients.  It’s a common format now.  These sorts of documentaries are interesting inasmuch as they introduce the viewer to the intricacies and travails of industries that may be new or out of the mainstream.  Often the shows are populated by unusual or outsized characters.  Here, the characters aren’t particularly outlandish (they are all excellent artists, and quirky people, but nothing too out-there), but their artistry is impressive, and there’s a lot to be said for watching people be competent.  But ultimately, the show tries a bit too hard to manufacture drama, which means we get to spend extra time on the hard-to-handle elements of the characters, and spend more time than I’d prefer on little disagreements among the artists.  What I really want to see is the before and after pictures, punctuated by demonstrations of their skillful technique. I guess what I’m saying is that I’d rather this were done in the style of a cooking show than a documentary.  And it’s not really fair to ask a show to be a different genre entirely.

Verdict:  I like the competence element, but when I need room on the DVR, this gets deleted early.

Million Dollar Shoppers (Lifetime, new.  Documentary.)

Watched: Episode 2

Premise:  I like shopping more than most, but “personal shopper” sounds like a very hard job.  It’s nice, I’m sure, to have relatively unlimited budgets and the opportunity to hunt for cool items for a living. But shopping is also a very personal endeavor—of any 100 items in the store, I’ll only expect to like a handful, and I have pretty arbitrary reasons for choosing that handful.  And of that handful, it’s a toss-up whether any will fit and look like I expect them to.  With that in mind, the personal shopper, who is in essence creating the dressing room in someone’s home or office, has an almost impossible task:  find a selection of things the client will like and that will fit the client.  This show demonstrates how difficult that task is, especially for demanding, presumptuous, or otherwise insufferable clients.  The shoppers are all oddballs in one way or another (undoubtedly, handpicked for tv), and the customers are portrayed as mostly sort of awful (or at least somewhat difficult) people, and the combination makes for an uncomfortable mélange of hard-to-watch characters.  It’s also a bit hard to swallow the unexamined privilege of the show’s characters:  I have no objection to the idea of someone who has more money than time, and therefore employs someone to do something time-saving.  But I do object to that person failing to recognize the privilege that allows them to do that, or treating their employee with disrespect. These characters do—and while that can be fun to watch in a “what’s this world come to” kind of way, it’s also a bit angering.  I expect the show is well-suited to people who enjoyed The Hills, or whatever that show was about Kelly Cutrone.  But it’s not for me.

Verdict: It’s not boring, but it’s not really a place I want to spend time, either.

Getting On (HBO, new.  Sitcom.)

Watched: pilot

Premise:   The daily travails of the extended-care wing of a hospital.

Promise:  This show’s adapted from the British series of the same name, and it shows.  It embodies a particular sort of droll satire-verité that the British do exceedingly well, and Americans often fumble at.  I’m thinking here of The Office and Twenty Twelve, but there are others as well.  They thrive on bureaucracy and unempathetic characters, and wallow in missed connections and awkward silences. I haven’t seen the British version of Getting On, but it appears that the American version is very similar to it:  it takes place in the extended care wing of a hospital, and focuses on the mostly competent, but very ill-guided, doctors and nurses who oversee these aging, infirm patients.  The result is an awkward slow-motion circus of poor communication and worse choices.  A doctor cares more about her study of fecal matter than about the patients who produce it; a nurse who lacks common sense; the one reasonable person in the room.  I don’t love the show.  It’s paced very slowly.  I’m sure this is intentional—it highlights the stultifying nature of its subject—but that can be hard to watch.  Many of the humor is the sort that only becomes funny through repetition, which means it’s pretty slow to reach the humor.  Likewise, the small ensemble cast highlights the loneliness of the work, but limits the comedic variety.  I could see this show reaching the sort of satirical brilliance.  It’ll require a faster pace, more physical humor, and more characters.  Fortunately, the preview implies that all three of these things are on the way.  How far can it go?  Hard to say.  Lambasting bureaucratic incompetence is funny when the stakes are (per Twenty Twelve) public embarrassment as the host city for the Olympics.  But perhaps it’s irretrievably sad when the stakes are the lives of elderly patients and their families. 

But here’s where today’s moral comes in:  in stark contrast to the shows above, these characters are mostly well-meaning, if short-sighted, and that goes a long way toward making the show watchable.  It’s still not easy to watch:  These people make terrible choices for terrible reasons, with terrible results.  Like a lot of satire, one must pierce through the sadness to find the humor, and the sadness here is so stiflingly poignant that it’s hard to see through.  But they aren’t all selfish, and for the most part they don’t mean to hurt anyone.  They’re just fumbling around in a world that doesn’t make a lot of sense, and that makes them more “real” than a heck of a lot of reality characters.

Verdict:  I’ll give it a couple of tries.

On the DVR  (or at least un-reviewed):  Lucky 7 (canceled); Sean Saves the World, Witches of East End, The Paradise, Ground Floor, and Atlantis.

Familiarity and Contempt

“This reminds me of something else” isn’t, in and of itself, a valid critique.  Of course, if a show is derivative or reminiscent of other shows it may leave viewers bored, or feeling they’ve seen it all before.  But the opposite may just as easily be true: hanging new ideas on a familiar framework may make those ideas shine all the more, and leave room for experimentation.  Reminding people of things they like can trigger happy associations and permit beneficial storytelling shortcuts.  This is one of the things that makes procedurals work so well:  the format of the procedural is so familiar that the writers can skip bits, leaving viewers familiar with the form to fill in the gaps, which means they can fit more story into less time.  Try watching a procedural from 25 years ago, and you may find yourself bored—because they have to lay down so much track before they can move the train forward.  Regular procedural watchers, nowadays, come with the track pre-laid.

I understand why reviewers are tempted to criticize shows as derivative.  I’m sure I myself have done it before, and no doubt I will do it again. But it’s not particularly rigorous, and it’s not something to be proud of.  It feels clever to recognize a show’s forbears, and putting the show down on that basis is as much self-congratulation as critique.  And for my part, it’s not a whole lot of fun to go through life feeling jaded.  I’d rather find the fun in the familiar and the fresh alike.   The truth is that derivativeness in itself isn’t bad.  What’s actually bad is derivativeness without interest.   Just as aping something boring will probably be boring, aping something interesting may create interesting results.  Likewise, if one apes something boring but adds interesting elements, the result might be quite interesting indeed.  To make an analogy:  the mere fact that humans usually come with a common skeletal configuration doesn’t make all humans ugly.  It all depends what they’re carrying on that skeleton. 

 

Almost Human (Fox, new.  Science fiction; law enforcement procedural.)

Watched:  First two episodes (two-night pilot)

Premise: In a dystopian future, a police officer and his emotion-enabled android partner fight crime.

Promise:  The struggle in reviewing this show is that it has considerable promise, but doesn’t really live up to it in its first episodes.  The premise is aptly introduced in the pilot, which paints a vivid picture of a dystopian future dominated by organized criminal elements.  Police officers are required by law to partner with AI androids, which presumably discourages corruption and improves efficiency, but creates inevitable stylistic contrasts.  The world  has a lot in common with Blade Runner, Minority Report, and other techno-dystopias that seem, for all their faults, disturbingly possible and even liveable.  In fact, it’s not just the setting that seems familiar, as the show as a whole is reminiscent of many science fiction and anime settings.  (Anime-wise, I especially found myself flashing to Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, but that’s only one of many.)  Indeed, there’s not a whole lot here that’s wholly original, but (unlike some other reviewers) I see that as a feature rather than a bug.  Since we can already guess what the world and its characters hold, we can dive right into its stories and idiosyncracies. 

But while the concept has a lot to offer, its execution is mixed.  The performances are good:  Karl Urban is especially nuanced as a cop who’s been physically repaired after a terrible injury, but remains psychologically broken in interesting ways.  The visuals are elaborate and strikingly well done.  But the execution breaks down in the scripts—the tone wobbles awkwardly between serious and self-important, on one hand, and banteringly light on the other.  On the whole, I prefer the latter tone, which many recent procedurals have done successfully without losing the gravity of their subjects.  The second episode was tonally better than the first, as the main characters began to develop a rapport—but its subject matter was annoying.  I’m not surprised that a show about androids and law enforcement would go to the sex-bot well, but to do so so early in the show’s run—even with the moderately original spin that this show put on it—seemed a bit like phoning it in.  But despite those flaws, which are significant, I have pretty high hopes for the show.  Given some time to breathe, and the growing rapport between the characters, I could see it blossoming into a nice, bantery, sci-fi procedural.

Verdict:  I really want it to work, but it hasn’t yet found its feet.  It remains to be seen whether it will do so.

On the DVR (or perhaps watched and/or deleted, but at least as-yet-unreviewed): Lucky 7 (canceled), Sean Saves the World, Witches of East End, Naked Vegas, Adam Devine’s House Party, Ground Floor, and The Paradise.  Plus, we get a couple of new HBO shows this weekend.

Subtitles

Subtitled shows come ready-made with assumptions, at least for most Americans whose first language is English.  They’ll be difficult to watch, probably high-brow and/or pretentious, and possibly boring.  Those assumptions are pervasive enough that it can be hard to convince oneself to dive in and watch a subtitled show.  It took me months (seriously) of amassing episodes of Borgen on my DVR before I finally managed to sit down and watch even its pilot episode.  When I did, though, I was rewarded with the interesting, enjoyable, funny, thoughtful show everyone had told me it would be.  Borgen isn’t alone, of course—I watch a lot of subtitled anime, and most of it is about as far as can be from high-brow, pretentious, difficult, or boring.  In fact—and this should come as no surprise—it’s about as varied as American TV.  Some is frivolous.  Some is high-quality. Some is touching and thought-provoking.  Et cetera.  

The point is that we’re ill-served by the stereotypical American assumptions about subtitled television.  There are, however, two points that are reasonable to assume.  The first is that subtitled TV will (for the primarily English-speaking viewer) almost certainly demand more attention than TV in English.  As I’ve mentioned before, I usually work with the TV on, which necessarily means that for a lot of my “TV time,” I’m looking at my work, not at the TV.  That’s impossible for subtitled TV, which requires direct ocular attention.  The attention probably benefits the show quite a bit—it goes without saying (and yet I’m about to say it) that an audiovisual medium almost certainly benefits from audiovisual attention.  On the other hand, that also makes it harder to find time to watch it, since it requires setting aside time during which one can devote one’s full attention to the screen.  The result is that subtitled TV needs to be just that much better than English-language TV for it to be “worth” putting on a regular watch list.  Which leads me to the second fair assumption: in order to air on an English-language channel in the US, TV in another language is probably the cream of some crop or other.  No one would bother to import it and subtitle it if it were total crap.  Combine these two assumptions, and subtitled TV, once it makes the watch list, ends up feeling like a “special occasion”—watching something that has earned, and will receive, full attention.

The Returned (Les Revenants) (Sundance channel, French, new to USA. Supernatural drama.)

Watched: First two episodes

Premise: Several people who have died return home mysteriously and suddenly to a small mountain town, un-aged and with no memory of their deaths or the intervening passage of time.

Promise:  The show is beautiful, meditative, and mysterious.  Two episodes in, we still have nothing resembling (or even pointing toward) answers, only difficult questions.  (What happened?  Why these people?  And many more.)  Much as The Killing focused as much on the family and friends of the victim, this show focuses not only on the Returned, but also on the people to whom they return, and how their lives are shaken by this impossible, confusing circumstance.  In fact, the show reminds me of the Killing in a few ways. Its pace is slow—maddeningly so at times—and its characters are complex and often opaque.  But they are interesting enough to care about, perhaps all the more so for not knowing what they’re thinking all the time.  The show is as concerned with its characters’ emotional states as with the central mystery, and I expect the facts will unfold gradually. 

The show is beautifully filmed, and maintains a horror-like tension despite its slow pace.  The result is that the show demands attention even when not much is happening, which is an impressive feat.  I don’t know how long it will hold that level of attention—after enough time without much happening and without any answers, I imagine there’s no amount of tension or beauty that would keep the viewer hanging on—but I’m guessing that even if we never get solid answers (and we may not), there will be enough to care about.

Verdict:  Gripping and interesting enough to merit subtitle-levels of time and attention, at least for now.

On the DVR:  A few things that I know I’m never going to watch, and a few that I’ve watched but not yet reviewed. These include, but are not limited to, Lucky 7 (canceled), Sean Saves the World, Witches of East End, The Pete Holmes Show, Naked Vegas, The Paradise, and Adam Devine's House Party.  So I’ve definitely got some posting ahead of me!

Cognitive Dissonance, or the Detriment of Expectation

Brand recognition is a tremendously efficient way of creating expectations.  If the sign says “Starbucks” or “McDonalds,” we know exactly what’s on the menu and how it will taste (for better or worse).  The same goes for shows:  we rely on branding, for example, to predict what a spin-off will be like. We rely on our knowledge of source materials--comic books, novels, movies--to predict what an adaptation will be about.  We rely on our knowledge of producers, creators, or showrunners to predict what kind of show we’re in for:  Bruckheimer, J.J. Abrams, Whedon, Chuck Lorre, Henson—with each, you know what you’re likely to get.  But brands aren’t always a blessing.  A familiar brand almost certainly gets people to tune in, but it might alienate others.  And if the show doesn’t live up to viewers’ expectation, the cognitive dissonance of getting something unpredictable may make it harder, not easier, for the viewer to enjoy the product.

This happened for Elementary:  viewers who tuned in for Sherlock Holmes got something else—a clever, entertaining, well-constructed crime procedural with some Holmesian flavoring, but very little in common with the original Holmes canon.  Elementary didn’t need the Holmes brand to tell good stories, so it's not entirely clear why it chose to brand itself as a Holmes adaptation.  Other shows have relied on Holmesian elements without doing so: Monk, House, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Rizzoli & Isles, Psych, Lie To Me….the list goes on and on.  Monk actually adapted at least one of its mystery plots directly from the Holmes canon (Mr. Monk and the Three Pies, from The Adventure of the Six Napoleons).  These shows are at least as canonically Holmesian as Elementary, which routinely uses names from the canon but—aside from Holmes and Watson, who share some similarities with their canonical forbears, almost never matches canonical names to canonical character traits.  For the Holmes fan, this takes quite a bit of getting used to.  A certain population of Holmes fans rebelled.  Others—those less familiar with the Holmes canon, or those who just enjoyed the good procedural and were willing to look past the show’s digressions from canon, kept watching it.  But let's be honest, those people probably would have kept watching anyway.

Still, there are a few reasons to brave these pitfalls and name a show for a known property.  One is to get eyeballs in the door.  People might be more likely to tune into a familiarly-branded show than a completely-new one.  Some of those people might stick with it even if it’s not what they expect.  The population of viewers driven away by cognitive dissonance may be smaller than the population attracted by familiarity.  And more generally, perhaps people should sometimes be forced (or more accurately tricked) into experiencing things we don’t already know we’ll like.  Plus, there’s something to be said for citing one’s sources.  Even if a show diverges wildly from its source material, it’s probably better to identify the source material than to pretend the show sprang, full-grown, from the head of the show’s creator.  And where does one draw the line?  I’m sure, for example, that although Masters of Sex is based on a real story, it diverges from actual history.  Actual history is often very interesting, but seldom fits neatly into storytelling norms.  So I would be surprised if the show hewed precisely to the facts.  I'd probably even be disappointed if it did.

So as I began writing this little rant, I thought my conclusion would be that shows should make a choice:  either embody their chosen identities, or choose new identities.  Authenticity or bust.  But now that I’ve spent all this time writing…maybe it’s we, the viewers, who should get over our closed-mindedness.  Maybe a “reimagining” can be just as valuable as a retelling.

That said, I’m still going to complain when a show claims to be one thing, and turns out to be another.  That’s just bad branding.

Reign (CW, new.  Costume drama.)

Watched: Pilot (a second episode has aired, but I haven't watched it yet).

Premise: Teen angst and politics in the French Court featuring a heavily fictionalized Mary, Queen of Scots and her ladies in waiting.

Promise:  The whole thing is historically way off, which is hard for me to get past.  I would so much rather watch a period/fantasy drama about made-up characters than something that purports to be history and totally isn’t at all.  I’m not talking here about the art direction, costumes, hair, etc. which are inaccurate but gorgeous—these things seldom hew closely to history, and arguably shouldn’t, since we need to be able to identify with them in order to identify with the characters.  I’m talking about historical facts, to which this story bears very little resemblance.  And I keep bumping so hard against that that it’s hard to enjoy what is, otherwise, a pretty fun/juicy teen drama with higher stakes (Life! Death! The future of nations!) than we usually see in such things.

So I’m going to try to review this as if it’s all just made up fiction, and words like “Scotland” and “France” and “England” refer to some alternate reality.  And viewed that way, it’s a surprisingly entertaining show.  There are elements of the insipid teen drama here – love triangles, fickle hearts, lots and lots of flirting – but on the whole, the show uses the tropes in ways that make them feel un-hackneyed, or at least less hackneyed than I’d expected.  People have reasons for their choices other than their fundamentally mercurial teenaged natures, and those choices have meaningful stakes, rather than feeling slight or soapy.  Likewise, there’s a mysterious element in this show (Ghosts? Or merely extremely deft conspirators?) that adds to the story.  This is quite a contrast from, say, The White Queen, whose “women’s magic” just felt gratuitous and vaguely sexist.  Finally, although there’s plenty of teen sexiness in this, it doesn’t have the “everybody fall into bed” quality that has become a teen drama epidemic—mainly because, given the constraints of the time, falling into bed was a much riskier activity (at least for women) than it is now.   I’m not saying this show is perfect—it has some of the wooden acting and contrived plots we’ve come to expect of teen dramas, and its anachronism bumps in some bothersome ways sometimes—but it maintains its teen drama appeal for those who like that sort of thing, and adds well-done elements for people who like costume drama as well.  In a way, it’s the best of both worlds—juicier and more fun than The White Queen, but more meaningful than the average teen drama.  It’s no Downton Abbey, to be sure, but it’s closer than I’d assumed it would be.

Verdict:  Terrible history—but maybe-not-bad television.  I'll have to keep watching to make sure.

Strike Back: Origins (Cinemax, new.  Action/Adventure.)

Watched: Pilot

Premise:  British Special Forces officer fights terrorists, seeks redemption.  

Promise:  I love Strike Back.  I love pretty much everything about it.  Great, straight-ahead action and adventure.  Things blowing up.  Firefights and chase scenes.  Complex, charismatic, competent characters.  Gorgeously-filmed yet brutal settings.  Really complicated global politics boiled down into a set of in-the-moment yes or no decisions--yet somehow managing to retain the moral ambiguity of those decisions.  (Which is not to say the politics of the show aren't problematic.  They are.  But at least the show doesn't ignore that fact.)  I can even go along with the gratuitous sex, because everyone is doing exactly what they want to do, and while the show's take on sexual politics is pretty problematic, it's also deeply complicated, and even sometimes quite thoughtful, and I appreciate that.  But what comes across most of all from Strike Back is its joy.  Even when it's telling the most complicated, brutal story, the show is having fun.

So you can imagine I was very excited for this spin-off, which tells the backstory of how Section 20 got started and the events leading up to the Strike Back pilot.  And indeed, the show has a lot of what I love from Strike Back.  It's just as complicated, just as beautiful, just as action-y.  The storytelling is just as effective.  But it's missing the joy.  The main character (Richard Armitage, in an outstanding performance) is broken in a serious way, and his search for redemption and vindication are powerful.  But whereas Scott and Stonebridge are broken in ways that turn their important and dangerous work into adventure, Porter is broken in a way that turns his adventure into important and dangerous work.  To be clear, I'm enjoying the show--but it's not quite what I thought I'd get when I tuned in to a Strike Back spin-off.

Verdict:  Is it Strike Back?  Not quite.  But it is top-rate action/adventure.

Dracula (NBC, new.  Supernatural drama.)

Watched: Pilot

Premise:  A vampire (Dracula), masquerading as a wealthy American industrialist, haunts Victorian London and fights a shadowy anti-vampire conspiracy.

Promise: The pilot packed a lot of information into one hour. Too much, perhaps--it started so many plot threads and introduced so many characters that it was a bit hard to follow and know who's who.  But it had a lot to do, because it had to replace all of our knowledge about Dracula and his story with a completely different story and dramatis personae.  Much like Elementary, this is a "reimagining" of a well-known canon.  And much like Elementary, it uses a lot of canonical names, and seemingly arbitrarily assigns them traits that have little or nothing to do with their canonical roots.

It's possible that, like Elementary, the show will end up working, although it will never quite feel like Dracula to me.  I wonder (as I do with Elementary and Reign) why the creators felt compelled to use familiar names for intentionally unfamiliar things.  But once one gets past the cognitive dissonance of those inauthenticities, it may turn out to be a good story.  The show's production values display a sort of idealized Victoriana: clean, mannered, and theatrical.  The tone is exaggeratedly seductive.  The plot promises to be intrigue-based and probably somewhat convoluted.  I suspect that in addition to highlighting various flirtations, the show will it will end up focusing on the continuing rivalry between Dracula and the conspiracy of vampire hunters, and on Dracula’s obsession with the young, practical Mina Murray.  But there's a lot of other things it could focus on, too--the weird and advanced technology that Dracula seems to have invented, for one. Whether the show will be fun to watch is harder to predict--it could be campy and fun; it could be overdramatic and fatiguing; it could even be boring.  It'll all depend on whether the characters become more identifiable.  If we start to care about them, we'll start to care about their stories.  If we don't, I don't think the pretty art direction and sexy tone will be enough to keep me watching.

Verdict:  Some good elements, but it's not compelling, yet.  So the jury's still out.

On the DVR:  I think it's time for me to issue some SimonBakers for shows I'm never going to get around to watching. But that's a choice for another day.  The DVR is currently home to Lucky 7 (canceled), Sean Saves the World, Witches of East End, The Pete Holmes Show, Naked Vegas, Adam Devine's House Party, and as of tonight, The Returned.