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.