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.

Stragglers

Sometimes, the reviews waiting in the queue just don't have much in common.  I suppose I could hold these two in abeyance until I had something more meaningful or profound to say about them...but it's not clear that either of these shows lend themselves to the meaningful or profound.  With that in mind:

@Midnight (Comedy Central, new.  Stand-up comedy/Game show)

Watched: first four episodes (1 week's worth)

Premise: Chris Hardwick hosts a comedy “lightning round” panel in which standup comics compete to ring in with funny jokes on topical subjects from Twitter and the Internet

Promise:  It’s like a cross between Jeselnik’s "panel" and NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, featuring stand-up comics with name recognition and, generally, some degree of nerd cred. The whole thing goes down quickly, easily, and amusingly.  Any given episode's level of hilarity depends heavily on the comics, however—when the panel is a funny bunch with good chemistry, it works; if not, it can easily fall flat.  I’m not sure how they’ll manage to keep the stable full for it—it’s a daily show, rather than a weekly one—but assuming they’re able to keep the stream running, it’s a good format.

Verdict:  light, fast-moving, generally entertaining, comedy.  I'll keep watching.

 

Ravenswood (ABC Family, new. Supernatural drama.)

Watched:  Pilot (and I could barely get through that)

Premise:  Teens explore the mysteries of a cursed town.

Promise:  If only this had aired in time to be included in the spin-off wrap-up.  This one is a spin-off from Pretty Little Liars.  It has little to recommend it, at least to non-fans of Pretty Little Liars (and I must admit to not being a fan).  Its exposition and world-building are even more stilted and wooden than The Originals—a feat I didn’t think was possible.  It attempts to be “creepy,” but comes off as self-conscious and affected.  The characters are about as multi-dimensional as characters in advertisements.  The result is that, although it sets up a credibly spooky mystery, the mystery holds little interest.  For fans of PLL, there may well be something to enjoy here—it apparently continues a story that began in a Halloween episode of that show—and so, to the extent people want to explore more about what that episode set up, they can get it here.  But I can’t help but think that might have been a gap better filled by fanfiction than by a whole series of television.

Verdict:  Happy this won’t be clogging up my DVR.

On the DVR:  Lucky 7 (canceled), Sean Saves the World, Witches of East End, Reign, Strike Back: Origins, Dracula.

Love, Lust, Control, and Respecting the Women in your Life

Perhaps stories about love and lust are always, in some way, stories about relinquishing control—letting go or giving control to someone else.  We have here two shows that highlight the relationship between sex and control—in one, people strive unsuccessfully for control as they surround themselves with the science of sex; and in the other, two people give in to their adulterous desires with predictably complicating results.   The shows don’t have much else in common—one is “quality” drama and the other is “sexy” drama (although both categories, and these shows' spots in them. are subject to debate).  But there is one other significant commonality.  Both shows highlight the fact that men really only hurt themselves when they underestimate, or take for granted, the women in their lives.  (The same may be true for women who do the same to their men, but that theory is untested in these shows.)  Of course, love and respect should go together.  Perhaps lust and respect should, but sometimes they don’t.  And perhaps that’s what we can learn from comparing these shows:  that lust without respect just isn’t that interesting.

Masters of Sex (Showtime, new.  Drama.)

Watched: first two episodes

Premise: The story of Masters and Johnson, a pair of medical researchers in the 1950’s who launch an early empirical study into human sexual response.

Promise: It sounds like the setup for a Skinemax porno, but although it’s sexy at times, it’s fundamentally a character-driven period drama about medical researchers in the 1950s.  The female lead is a sexually liberated, professionally ambitious woman in an era when few women publicly admitted to being either. She maneuvers to get what she wants, and then faces the undeserved, albeit not unlikely, consequences of her actions.   The male lead is a doctor who’s more passionate about the study of sex than about the having of it.  He wants to understand women’s physical sexual response, but has very little interest in understanding women themselves.  His ego and intellect mean he is smart enough to convince himself that his selfish, often cruel decisions are for the benefit of others.  The others are interesting too—the doctor’s wife; a prostitute who helps him with the study; and NicholasD’Agosto (of whom I’ve long been a fan) as a sexist cad who wants more of a relationship, or perhaps just more control over the woman in it, than the friends-with-benefits arrangement he’s offered.  All of them strive for a sort of control over their environment that they just can’t have, and that is the core of the show—strive as we might, we are all, ultimately, at the mercy of each other. 

The show is, in large part, about gender inequality and normative gender expectations.  But unlike many shows in the "quality" genre that hard-sell gender inequality, this one doesn't also appear to champion it.  In general, the women are competent and have their own wills.  They’re often punished for that competence or will, or for their trust in others, but the show never implies that the punishment is just, only consequential.  Regarding sex, the shows views seem to be a bit complicated.  Although the premise of the show is that marriage, love, and sex don’t (and shouldn't) always go together, its moral is that sexual liberation isn’t a panacea.  It’s not sex-negative so much as it’s considerateness-positive, but its implicit message is that without communication, neither sex nor marriage is likely to be a good idea.  In other words, until people learn to respect and appreciate each other, they’ll never be able to achieve quite what they want.  And who am I to reject that message?  

Verdict:  So far, it remains interesting.  It’s right on the border of the sort of drama that I find more “good” than “interesting,” but at this stage it’s both.  I’m willing to give it a continued try.

Betrayal (ABC, new.  Drama.)

Watched: Pilot

Premise:  Anatomy of an extramarital affair between a prosecutor’s wife and a mobster’s attorney.

Promise:  It's not a terribly new concept:  a woman and a man—each already married—meet and experience instant, irresistible chemistry that leads them into an extramarital affair.  Here, they meet as photographer and gallery-goer, respectively; it isn’t until late in the pilot that we discover the facts that make their affair a particularly inopportune match.  I’m not a huge fan of infidelity stories—I don’t enjoy watching people lie for selfish reasons—but they can be done well, and when they are, I’m willing to enjoy them.  So I was ready to give this show the benefit of the soapy doubt.  “Lust is a force beyond our control” isn’t the worst theme ever, although it’s certainly not a particularly original one.   

And although this show isn’t terribly original, it also isn’t bad, exactly…it just isn’t good in any particular way.  The characters’ lives and emotions are complex enough for them to be human, but none of them are particularly distinctive.  They’re all different varieties of blah or unlikeable … and they’re not quite hateable enough for me to wish them ill, either.  So we’re left with the story of a bunch of people we don’t particularly care about one way or the other.  It may be possible to make a satisfying story about such people, but I don’t have confidence that this will do that, either.  It’s a driving narrative, but I’m not sure I care what it’s driving toward. I don’t happen to watch True Blood or Revenge, but both of them have sort of a “guilty pleasure” juiciness that makes them appealing even if they aren’t particularly satisfying stories.  This show doesn’t have that, either.  One reason, I suspect, is that both parties have children—which means the consequences of their affair, whatever they may be, will fall on their innocent children as well as their (apparently unappreciative) spouses.  To up the drama, the show foreshadows that someone will shoot the female lead 6 months from now—we aren’t told who, or why, or whether she will live.  I suppose the foreshadowing is supposed to give us something to be curious about, but instead it seems a bit gratuitous. In fact, the whole show seems a bit gratuitous.

Verdict:  Not much to recommend it unless you’re a big fan of infidelity stories.

On the DVR: Lucky 7 (canceled), Sean Saves the World, Witches of East End, Reign, @Midnight, and Ravenswood  (recording tonight)