"B" TV

I have great fondness for what I call "B" TV—the television equivalent of B Movies.  These are shows whose primary aim is fun and entertainment.  No serious message, no worrying about authenticity or complex production values—they’re on the Fun Train, having a good time.  I think of this as “Saturday Afternoon” television, although it’s been a long time since shows like Xena and Hercules made that true.  Now its main home is cable prime time, and I think that’s a good thing.  Television doesn’t have to be serious to be good—and doesn’t even have to be good to be enjoyable, or even important.  Star Trek may have started as B TV, but it changed the world.

Of course, just because I’m fond of B TV doesn’t mean that B shows get a pass from me.  My standards for B TV may be different, but they still exist.  B TV still has to be interesting, and it still has to respect it audience.  This means its characters still need coherent motivations and distinct personalities we can care about (or at least enjoy watching).  Storywise, a B TV show actually has a pretty tough job; since its stories probably won’t do much to surprise us or make us think, they need to delight us.  We may not care whether they’re authentic, but we do care whether they hold together, make sense, and have stakes that resonate.

A few recent shows have felt to me like B TV.  And a few summer shows felt the same way, so I’m taking this opportunity to post catch-up reviews.   I don’t know that they were all necessarily aiming for the B oeuvre – in fact I suspect a few of them might have been aiming for more mainstream status.  But they felt B-ish to me.  

Z Nation (Syfy, new.  Post-Apocalyptic Action/Adventure)

Watched: Pilot

Premise:  After the zombie apocalypse, a ragtag bunch tries to shepherd humanity’s last hope for survival to a lab across the country.

Promise:  This show is produced by The Asylum, best known for producing some powerfully silly “Mockbsuter” movies including a Sherlock Holmes that somehow manages to incorporate dinosaurs.  So that provides a frame of reference. The stakes are high, for sure, and there’s lots of action, generally of the sort we’ve become very accustomed to in the zombie genre.  It aims for humor and action at the same time, which can be a lot of fun, although glibness in the face of massive destruction can also be tiring to watch.  But really, there are two problems.  The first is endemic to the attempt to combine zombies and action/adventure.  It’s been done well before, of course, but as a general matter it’s difficult, because zombies make for pretty terrible fight scenes.  The objective—by necessity—must be to keep the zombies far away from the uninfected combatants.  That means that zombie fights are best when they are horde-based, and basically rules out close combat or melee fighting of any sort except the “immediate kill” variety.  From an action perspective, this isn’t nearly as interesting as watching well-matched opponents duke it out.  The second is that, at least in the pilot, the characters are more archetypes than people, and I was never able to make enough of a connection to care about any of them.  So the show wants to be about action rather than character, but then has trouble being about action.  The best thing about the show, by far, is isolated radio broadcaster “Citizen Z,” played by DJ Qualls, the lone survivor of a radio relay station who’s taken to broadcasting to humanity.  That’s wonderful.  But in itself, it doesn’t carry the show for me.

Verdict:  not interesting enough.

The Transporter: The Series (TNT, Canadian, New to US.  Action/Adventure.)

Watched:  5 episodes

Premise:  A Man of Adventure delivers packages (and occasionally people) under often-adverse circumstances.

Promise:  This is a TV adaptation of the Transporter films, complete with the stunt driving, fight scenes, and flirtatiousness of its source material.  It was originally slated to appear on Cinemax (presumably it had some premium-cable sexytimes that got cut for TNT’s two-episode-a-week stripping of the how), so its production values are higher than most B TV, but its heart is squarely in B territory.  It’s somewhere between a TV show, a Bond film (complete with a teaser segment that's frequently unrelated to the rest of the story), and an Audi ad.  It’s showing out of order on U.S. TV, and it barely matters, because there’s no season arc to speak of.  Each episode is formulaic in the extreme.   It embodies all sorts of stereotypes about gender and ethnicity, and it depends on male bravado for much of its drive.  It sexually objectifies nearly every woman it encounters, including the ones it also portrays as clever, smart, and good at fighting.  It’s often silly, clunkily written, and incoherently dependent on coincidence.  It’s oddly obsessed with taking down dictatorial fathers who live vicariously through their sons.  So I really have no excuse for liking it.  And yet I do.  Why?  I love good chase scenes, and I love Hong-Kong style fight scenes, and this has lots of each.  I enjoy its stoic yet moderately charismatic hero who is glibly chivalric and transcends his amoral exterior just often enough to be an antihero.  It has stakes I can appreciate and, despite being formulaic, it has tension.  

Verdict:  I find it fun, despite its many faults.  I have an explanation, but really no excuse.

Constantine (NBC, new.  Supernatural drama.)

Watched:  First two episodes

Premise:  Reluctant hero deals with demons and angels.  Based on the DC comic Hellblazer.

Promise:  This show is a strange fit for NBC.  It feels like B TV, and shares a tone and quality level with BBC America “Supernatural Saturday” shows like Hex, Demons, and Bedlam.  So although it’s on a Network, it feels right to treat it as B TV.  And oddly, I’d be more likely to watch and enjoy the exact same show if it were on SyFy.  I think that’s part of the problem:  it feels like it can be so much better than it is. 

The show undergoes a significant change first and second episode, both tonally and ensemble-wise.  There’s a good reason for this—Lucy Griffithswas cast as the female lead and after the pilot, was replaced with a different character, presumably one who flirt with the lead (as opposed to being his friend’s daughter).  So the first episode is mostly useless as an introduction to the cast dynamic, and the second episode is largely repetitive, familiarizing a second character to the same thing.  (And yet, even after two episodes, the audience is still left a bit in the dark about the whole thing.)  We spend the time being introduced to two different women, one of whom doesn’t understand her own power and needs a man to protect and guide her, and the other a “spicy” Latina who’s more self-possessed than the first, but also more sexually objectified.  But beyond the redundancy and the gender stereotyping, the midstream horse-changing tends to reinforce my impression that the show wasn’t entirely thought out ahead of time.  It’s an adaptation of a successful comic, so it would be easy to assume that it didn’t need much work to turn into a show.  And yet what feel right and authentic on the page doesn’t necessarily feel the same way on the screen.  The stakes feel unnecessarily complicated and artificial.  An even bigger problem is the lead, who should be charismatic and tortured, but just comes across as annoyed all the time.  And I don’t want to watch someone who’s annoyed all the time.  

Verdict:  It’s not bad, exactly, but there’s not much there I want to come back to watch more of, either. 

The Almighty Johnsons (SyFy, New Zealand, New to US (summer).  Supernatural drama.)

Watched:  Pilot

Premise:  21 year old discovers he and his brothers are (literally) Norse gods and will come into their powers if he finds his true love.

Promise:  Feels a bit like Buffy, but with a boy, which is one reason why I’m hesitant to judge it on the episode I saw.  It took quite a while for Buffy to get good—I don’t know that I would have ended up watching and loving the show if I’d started with the pilot.  Like Buffy, this is a show about someone who really just wants to be a kid but has a destiny that won’t really let him.  And that’s a good setup, generally speaking.  But the most obvious difference I that Buffy is a young woman reluctantly finding her power, and the lead in this is almost exactly the opposite.  Maybe I’m just not that interested in a story about a white horndog man-child who finds out he’s even more powerful than his position in society made him, who just wants to treat girls like disposable sex objects rather than grow up and treat women with respect.  And I don’t think I would even particularly mind that, believe it or not, if the show didn’t very explicitly set up a battle of the sexes—the antagonists, it seems, are a group of goddesses who don’t want our hero to come into his own, and use sass, trickery and sex appeal to distract and hinder him.  Frankly, I think I’d rather watch the show where they’re the heroes and his best friend (played incongruously well by Keisha Castle-Hughes) is the main character.  So even if it will get good—and it certainly could—I think I might just not be into the premise.  

Verdict: hard to tell from just one episode, but the gender dynamics might just disrupt the fun too much for me.

Dominion (Syfy, new (summer).  Post-Apocalyptic Supernatural Action Drama.)

Watched: pilot

Premise:  Angels wage war on humankind and an unlikely savior appears as prophesied.

Promise:  There were a lot of things to enjoy in this pilot, which set up a rich, complex world—but that richness and complexity were also the problem: there were too many things, and not much sense of what to grab on to.  Perhaps because the show is based on a movie (Legion), there was a lot of worldbuilding, mythology, and back story that was sort of assumed away, as if the viewer already knew it.  (I didn’t.)  And because the pilot set up a large, complicated cast of players, antagonists, betrayals, and loves, it didn’t really have time to tell a story—it was all setup for a story yet to come.  At the center of it seem to be a turncoat angel who’s helping humanity but may not be entirely trustworthy; a televangelist type who seems shady and dictatorial; a soldier who is predestined to be the savior of humanity; a cult of sexually manipulative and very shady women; and an impossibly good, pure princess-type who’s beloved by the people and is a (symbolic, and to a meaningful extent also material) totem for the conflict among the men. And that’s only a small sliver of the group, though, and probably not a very accurate picture—it was hard to tell.  Likewise, I was a bit troubled by the implications I saw in the pilot about women’s sexuality as dangerous and women’s purity as redemptive, but I don’t actually have a good sense of whether further episodes would play out the way the pilot implied.  I genuinely looked forward to watching more of it and finding out what it was all about, but then my summer got complicated and I got so behind that I decided to delete it from the DVR and watch it on demand, and then I never did.  Perhaps I shall, someday, since it has been renewed for a second season.

Verdict: Shows promise, but also unnecessary complication. 

On the DVR/Unreviewed:  Tyrant, Manhattan, The Knick, Red Band Society, The Mysteries of Laura, Madam Secretary, Gotham, Scorpion, Forever, Survivor’s Remorse, The Flash.

Making Something New

I believe I’ve written here before about how I think we live in an unprecedented time for procedurals and longer-form television mysteries.  Because the forms are so well developed, viewers know the conventions of the form, and shows can take shortcuts and experiment with subverting the form.  This formal familiarity makes sub-genres like the banter procedural and the character-driven procedural possible:  because we already know what to expect from the procedure, the show can skip the track-laying and use that extra time to do other things. 

Today’s group of procedurals and mysteries (not the whole crop for the season; there are too many!) take very different approaches to this invitation to do “something new” within their respective forms.  Legends takes two very well-developed forms (undercover law enforcement procedural and spy/conspiracy drama) and marries them with each other, creating a result that feels newer than its familiar formal origins would predict.  Stalker sets up its male lead as a perpetrator of exactly the sort of crime he’s meant to combat—and as my review below demonstrates, I’m really conflicted about whether it works or not.   Gracepoint doesn’t do anything new at all—it’s a carbon copy of its UK source material—but its source, Broadchurch, freshens the long-form mystery form (Prime Suspect, The Killing) by adding a sense of personal connection between one of the investigators and the small town where it takes place, and making its male lead a sort of mystery in himself.  And NCIS: New Orleans doesn’t even try.  The NCIS formula runs on rails; it just puts a new train on those tracks.

NCIS: New Orleans (CBS, new.  Law enforcement procedural.)

Watched: pilot

Premise: A forensic team in New Orleans investigates Navy-related crime.

Promise:  This is a cookie-cutter procedural, with some Cajun spice tossed around, by which I mean the lead investigator (Scott Bakula) plays jazz and cooks regional food.  It has the regular CBS-procedural mix of forensic crime solving and interpersonal banter, and as per formula, the characters are archetypes with quirks that collectively make the procedural team tick.  The show relies heavily on the idea that a team of this sort should bond together and becomes a family, and I often enjoy watching that sort of family-like professional dynamic.  ZoeMcLellan as “the new girl” and CCH Pounder as “the experienced medical examiner” bring lively personalities to the table.  We feel like we already know everyone from the first few moments, because we do—they’re exactly the people who populate this sort of show.

I found it somewhat odd that a predominantly white team is working in this predominantly African-American city, although the demographic imbalance wasn’t as troubling as the pilot’s heavy reliance on the tired “white person saves at-risk black kid” trope and associated stereotypes about black youth and gangs.  It took a story that could be about the struggles of a young person facing hard odds and turned it into a story about the white man that “saved” him.   In the end, though, my decision not to add the show to my “continue watching” queue wasn’t about anything particularly objectionable—in fact, there are plenty of things I would probably enjoy about the show as its chosen-family dynamic grows—but rather, about the feeling that if I missed some episodes, I wouldn’t miss anything I couldn’t predict. It’s as if the show already knows it’s just painting by numbers. 

Verdict:  A totally serviceable forensic procedural that I won’t watch much of.

Legends (TNT, summer 2014.  Conspiracy/suspense drama.)

Watched:  whole first season

Premise:  An FBI undercover specialist struggles to find himself amid his sea of personal histories.

Promise:  Based on advertising for the show, I had assumed it was a procedural about an undercover cop.  I was wrong:  although there are elements of that, it’s much more of a spy show than a law enforcement show, and it focuses far more on a deeper conspiracy than on particular crimes.  In essence, the main character (played by Sean Bean) is the mystery; the core questions of the series revolve around uncovering his own personal history, which even he does not know.   There wasn’t anything terribly original about the undercover work or the conspiracy, but there was something about the combination of the two that felt compelling, and I found myself swept along into it, wanting to know the secrets just as our hero did.  It reminded me of stories about spy types trying to find their place in the world and identify the right targets for their righteous vengeance, like Hunted or LaFemme Nikita, but with a male lead.  (And I will say, there’s something oddly refreshing about a show where a man is initially stripped of identity and personhood, for a change.  Don’t get me wrong:  I enjoy shows about powerful women reclaiming their selfhood, but each of them starts, by necessity, with a woman who’s been hollowed out.  This one isn’t the first to begin with a hollow man, but it’s the first one I can recall in a while.)

Bean’s character is one of these gritty justice-at-any-cost types, which often bothers me with law enforcement shows, but this had enough of a spy fantasy mood that it just washed over me.    I could express my annoyance at the “undercover handler has to go undercover herself as a stripper” trope, or the use of female sexuality as a lever of persuasion throughout the plot, but I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention the totally competent and likeable female hacker (played by Tina Majorino, hooray) and a couple of other very capable women who I won’t go into detail about for spoiler reasons.  So my main critiques have to do with the shallow treatment of the supporting cast, all of whom get glimmers of much more interesting personal histories of their own, but never get to shine in their own rights.  

Verdict:  Not exactly high art, but an enjoyable enough conspiracy puzzle to sweep me along.

Gracepoint (Fox, new-to-U.S. Long-form mystery.)

Watched: first four episodes

Premise:  Police and the community respond when a boy is found dead on the beach in a small town.

Promise:  It’s a bit hard for me to review this, because it’s almost a shot for shot remake of the BBC’s Broadchurch, which I found to be amazing: a taut, twisty, emotionally wrenching tour de force.  This is exactly the same, yet not quite the same (even down to David Tennant playing the male lead in both, but with an American accent this time), which puts it in an uncanny valley of sorts.  I have no idea whether it’ll end in the same way as the British version.  If it does, it’ll be disappointingly repetitious for those of us who have seen it before.  If it doesn’t, it’ll be an interesting storytelling experiment in how the same setup can lead to a different outcome.  Overall, I can repeat my original review of Broadchurch:  “it has much in common with The Killing: it’s a long-form mystery that more broadly explores the interrelated stories of the people influenced by it – the police detectives, the victim’s family, journalists covering the crime, and the other residents of the small town where it takes place . . . Few characters are either wholly likeable or wholly not; the result is that they are all interesting, or at least potentially so, but also sometimes we’re angry with them and sometimes we root for them, the way we would for real people.”

As for the adaptation, I am pleasantly surprised that some of the emotional beats still hit me in the pilot even though I knew they were coming.  But so far the actors (especially the female lead) seem to have aimed for somewhat more sympathetic performances, which means that the story will have to rely more on sensational aspects and less on the seething undercurrent that made us feel slightly uncomfortable at all times in Broadchurch.  We’ll see whether that makes a big difference in how the show unfolds.

Verdict:  Worth trying if you didn’t watch Broadchurch, and maybe even if you did.  Meanwhile, if you didn’t watch Broadchurch, consider Netflixing that.

Stalker (CBS, new.  Law enforcement procedural.)

Watched: first three episodes

Premise: A unit of the LAPD investigates stalking crimes.

Promise: I have very complicated feelings about this show.  Very complicated.  Complicated enough that I almost made it a whole post of its own, before considering just how many shows are in my backlog.  So please bear with me if this ends up being a longer review than most.  The show has gotten some pretty bad reviews, and has been described as misogynist by multiple reviewers.  I don’t disagree.  The show sensationalizes stalking and all too often embodies the voyeuristic tendencies it purports to condemn.  (Seriously, there are a lot of shots of women disrobing.  It’s troubling.)  

And I could end the review there and walk away, and that would be a fine review.  But I also want to complicate that discussion a bit.  To write the show off as misogynistic and exploitive is to ignore some of the things it actually does very well.  First, and most importantly, it explains and demonstrates just how unsettling, disruptive, and violating stalking is for its victims.  It’s all too easy to write off stalking as a victimless crime, and it’s not.  This show does a pretty good job of demonstrating why not—how victims’ lives can be changed, even permanently so, by the experience of being stalked.  Second, it’s very good at explaining some of the possibly-counterintuitive behaviors of stalking victims.  It’s all too easy to condemn victims for not reporting, for example, but this show demonstrates why they don’t—that reports of stalking can seem subjective or difficult to believe; that stalking victims can (wrongly) believe they are to blame for their stalkers’ behavior; and that stalking victims are afraid of sounding narcissistic, to name a few.  On this show, we hear stalking victims articulate those concerns and we feel sympathy and empathy for them, which is important.  Third, it demonstrates just how difficult stalking can be to investigate.  It’s hard to identify perpetrators whose crime is often all about hiding.  And finally, it demonstrates powerfully how stalking is often a crime rooted in compulsion and lack of empathy, and isn’t about flattery, or love, or any of the other positive descriptors that get tossed around to defend stalking behaviors.  By placing the camera in the eyes of the perpetrators sometimes, it demonstrates just how different the stalker mindset is from the norm.  We don’t feel comfortable watching, and we shouldn’t. 

So the show does a good job of exploding some of the myths about stalking.  And yet.  And yet.  Then it seems to endorse a stalker.  The male lead (played by Dylan McDermott) is a stalker, no two ways about it.  He is an excellent investigator.  He knows he’s flawed, and professes to be serious about self-improvement, while not perfectly embodying his goals.  This makes him interesting.  But for all his talk about self-improvement, he seems not to have any self-awareness about the fact that he is a stalker, stalking his young son in an attempt to reconcile with him.  We know that things are “off” about him—we see various demonstrations that he doesn’t seem to operate with the same sort of empathy that people should have.  So, ok, that makes it seem like he’s a villain, with the same compulsion and lack of empathy as the villains-of-the-week.  And while it’s odd to hide a villain in that lead role, it’s not unprecedented.  Think Dexter.  Except Dexter believes he’s making the world a better place by killing (and may even be, although that's a tougher call); this lead simply doesn’t seem to know that what he’s doing is wrong.  And there’s the problem:  it’s hard to know what the show wants us to think.  Does it want him to succeed?  Somehow I doubt it—I would be very surprised if the show ultimately reconciled him with his son.  But it does seem to want our sympathy for this man.  It implies that he can’t help it, and (worse yet) that it may make him better at investigating stalking crimes.  It’s almost as if we’re supposed to have compassion for the stalkers as well as their victims.  And while I’m usually in favor of more compassion, I think here it undermines many of the good things that the show does.  I’m not necessarily against moral ambiguity—but here, it’s counterproductive unless and until the show stops treating the lead as sympathetic.

The fact that I’ve watched a few episodes of this demonstrates that it’s intriguing, in its way, if for no other reason than the puzzle of figuring out what the show wants us to think about the lead.  What’s most interesting to me is that my characterization of the show is precisely my characterization of the lead:  it is very good at some things, and then does this offensive thing too.  And perhaps that’s the crux of it.  If I’m going to condemn the lead of this show, I should condemn the whole show.  But I can’t completely overlook the sliver of good in each of them.

Verdict:  I really don’t want to see more shows like this one.  But it’s more complicated than just “trash.”

On the DVR/Unreviewed:  Dominion, Tyrant, The Almighty Johnsons, Manhattan, The Knick, Z Nation, Red Band Society, The Mysteries of Laura, Madam Secretary, Gotham, Scoprion, Forever, Survivor's Remorse, The Flash, Transporter, Constantine.

Ill Legal

I tend to avoid watching shows about lawyers, because they make me lose critical distance.  It's personal for me; I just have a lot of difficulty watching them impartially.  Lawyer shows often ignore the fact that the law is an extremely regulated ethical environment, and to the extent that they do portray any of the (intense) ethical obligations of lawyers, they tend to portray lawyers as ethically-challenged, just looking for ways around those obligations.  This fundamentally turns the truth of law practice on its head.  I don’t mean to say that every lawyer is ethical—there are bad apples in every profession, and unethical lawyer stories hit the press every so often—but the very fact that we hear about it when lawyers are unethical highlights the rarity of those ethical breaches.  (In fact, the vast majority of ethical breaches in the law involve desperate, misguided lawyers “borrowing” money from their clients’ accounts, and getting disbarred for it.) 

I absolutely understand why these shows do it—stories about totally normal people doing totally normal things are much harder to make interesting than stories about people walking close to the edges of bad ideas.  So I can’t criticize the shows for doing the same thing to the law that I often enjoy when it happens to other professions in other shows.  House was a terrible example of a doctor. Being a bodyguard probably looks nothing like Human Target, and being a spy probably looks nothing like Covert Affairs.  Solving crime surely doesn’t happen at the pace of TV.  Forensic criminalists surely almost never interrogate witnesses.  But somehow I can enjoy these deviations from the truth, and can't the same thing with law.  Maybe it’s just that, as a legal professional, I’m more sensitive about law.  I’d expect doctors to be just as uncomfortable with House.  But also, I’m concerned that the consistent portrayal of lawyers as ethically-challenged feeds recursively into the way TV viewers actually view the legal profession.  “Lawyer jokes” play on the same false traits that TV often portrays.  And legal ethics—as strict and moral as they are—can genuinely look strange from the outside.  (For example, client confidentiality is a crucial element of law practice, because the system needs clients to trust their lawyers.  But it also means that sometimes lawyers know things that they can’t disclose, which looks strange to non-lawyers.  Likewise, lawyers sometimes have to make alternative arguments—“he didn’t do it, but if he did, it was justified”—that can seem disingenuous from the outside, even though they can be important to the law’s process of finding justice and resolving disputes. )  So my concern is that these consistent portrayals of lawyers as unethical, just like consistent portrayals of gender or race stereotypes, can bleed in and out of public perception just as unfairly as those other stereotypes do.  

So, to sum up, I have trouble watching law shows impartially.

But with that caveat about critical distance, I wanted to watch these three shows because each featured a female protagonist embarking on major personal challenges.  What I found sometimes worked, and sometimes didn't, but sadly brought me right back to the stereotype bin.  Each of the three shows takes radically different approaches to the law, but they have one thing in common:  each portrays its female protagonist as independent, opinionated…and a slave to her emotions and sexuality. 

How to Get Away with Murder (ABC, new. Legal drama.)

Watched: pilot

Premise:  Law students assist their professor’s criminal defense clients in ethically unacceptable ways.

Promise:  As a show about law (and especially about law teaching), this is totally offensive.  The law professor encourages her first-year law students to miss meetings other essential courses, rewards them for unethical practices like lying and destroying evidence, and doesn’t actually teach them anything about the law.  In recent years there’s been a move toward “experiential learning” in law school, and there’s a good reason for that:  lawyers learn by doing.  And here, this professor is teaching them to do things directly aimed at separating the students from their moral cores, and that’s appalling. 

But setting aside my feelings about how this show portrays the law and legal education, I have other critiques.  I was hoping to really enjoy another show about a strong woman of color, but I found this portrayal too mired in stereotypes to enjoy it.  The protagonist’s bad decisions in the pilot seem consistently based on irrational emotionality and sexuality, which combine for a heady mix of bad decisions.  For example, she blames her unethical sexual promiscuity on the fact that she and her husband have been talking about having children, which apparently pings some emotional button for her.  The whole show seems tied not only to the “women are irrationally sexual beings” trope but also to another trope that I may do a whole post on, sometime—that women can’t be wholly competent because they just have too many feelings.  And on top of that, she’s mean.  Mean characters can be interesting—House was mean, and I loved watching him—but unlike House, this protagonist doesn’t have a foil.  House works as a character partly because Wilson reminds us that there is something likeable about him, and works as a force to check his crueler impulses.  But this character has such complete control over everyone in her life that there’s nothing to stop her from just seeming evil.

All those things aside, though, this show has much the same juicy stories and team dynamic as Scandal, and juicy teamy stories can be a lot of fun.  So If you like Scandal—and at times, I really have—t’s reasonable to like this.

Verdict:  Problematic in a whole bunch of ways, but not without juicy appeal...for people who won't want to throw things at the TV like I do when I watch it.

 

Bad Judge (NBC, new.  Sitcom.)

Watched: pilot

Premise: A judge is a total mess personally, but a surprisingly good jurist.

Promise: This show aims for a sort of updated Night Court vibe in places, and that's fun.  It, too, undermines the dignity of the legal system, but I’m less surprised and disappointed by that, because it’s a sitcom and I don’t look to my sitcoms for dignity.  In fact, despite the protagonist’s terrible personal decision-making, I'm somewhat heartened that it shows her making generally competent decisions from the bench. I am troubled that the judge’s colleagues seem to criticize her for her caring, which really isn’t actually how being a judge works (or should work, for that matter).  My chief concern here, though, is that for all her intelligence and compassion, this woman, like the previous protagonist, is a total slave to her emotions (shirking professional duties to look after a child in need makes her a good person, but not a dependable public servant) and her sexuality (with amusing, but undignified and stereotype-promoting results). 

Verdict:  Has some charm and some heart—much the same sort of heart as Bad Teacher, and many of the same problems—but not funny enough to merit the time.

The Divide (WeTV, new over the summer.  Legal drama.)

Watched:  Most of the first season

Premise:  The swirling impacts of the Innocence Initiative’s reinvestigation of a death row case.

Promise:  This is a particularly compelling take on the law, presenting a more nuanced look than most at the strengths and vulnerabilities of the system—particularly the vulnerabilities, and particularly the influence that prejudice can have on the justice process.  Like The Killing, it reaches beyond the mystery and delves into the way the case influences everyone it touches.  The story is awash with moral ambiguity:  in the pilot, we encounter a convicted man who is far from an innocent, but also happens to be the victim of a complicated conspiracy and rush to judgment, fueled by the sorts of ethical lapses that may mean well, but have destructive results nonetheless.  His story triggers a complicated web of consequences that carry the show through the season, revealing larger conspiracies that highlight issues of race and privilege and how they can contort the law.

This show isn’t particularly kind to its attorneys, but—like The Wire—when it depicts the system being bent out of shape, it feels more genuinely critical than sensationalized.  And its protagonist—a young woman studying for the bar exam while interning at the Innocence Initiative in the wake of seeing her father (possibly wrongly) put on death row—seems like a real person.  She, like the previous ones, is driven by her emotional attachments, but in a way that seems less like a stereotype about women and more like the consequences of the kind of personal obsession that anyone could develop.  What’s different about it is that she has a reason for her emotions, other than just being female.  The cast is an impressive assemblage of TV pros, including a few from The Wire, and the show has a similar tone and complexity.  It was originally created for AMC, and I can see why—WeTV did well to pick it up, but I have seen almost no promotion for the show, which was a mistake.  It could have been a water cooler show.

Verdict:  Not always easy to watch, but still worth Netflixing.

On the DVR/Unreviewed:  A few lingerers from the summer, and a whole giant bunch from the Fall.  Dominion, Tyrant, The Almighty Johnsons, The Knick, Legends, Z Nation, Red Band Society, The Mysteries of Laura, Madam Secretary, Gotham, Scorpion, Forever, NCIS: New Orleans, Stalker, Gracepoint, Survivor's Remorse, The Flash.

Bewilderers

I’ve noted before in this space that I have an unusually high tolerance for not knowing what the heck is going on in a television series.  I enjoy the feeling of trying to pull together seemingly random pieces of information, trying to see how they fit together into a story.  But I also know that this makes me an outlier, rather than the norm—which makes it all the stranger that this summer has offered several series designed specifically to make the viewer wonder (and, often, figure out) what the heck is going on.  I call these sorts of shows “bewilderers.”

This summer’s bewilderers widely in effectiveness, and here’s my theory about why:  a central mystery, no matter how fascinating it is, cannot carry the entire weight of a series.  It can certainly create a very effective story engine, especially in the beginning, but it can’t be the only interesting thing thing in a show because it’s not sustainable.  The reason is that over time, your characters and/or viewers have to gain insight into what’s going on.  If the mystery is the only interesting thing and the insight-gaining process is too fast, then you’ve instantly lost the only interesting thing about your show.  If the mystery is the only interesting thing and the insight-gaining process is too slow, then your viewers will become either enraged or bored (depending on their temperaments) and quit your show.  So unless a central mystery is surrounded by interesting characters or stakes that will remain interesting after the mystery is resolved, there’s no hope in anything other than a limited series.  And if you plan never to solve (or try to solve) the central mystery—I’m talking to you, Damon Lindelof—then it’s not really a mystery, and it doesn’t create any interest at all.  An interesting setting is not the same thing as an interesting show.

And while I’m on the topic, uncurious characters tend not to be interesting characters.  I’m not saying that stories about “dealing with the world as it is” are automatically less interesting than stories about “finding out what happened” or “fixing problems,” but if the task at hand is simply dealing with the present, then the characters need to have a pretty good grasp on what the present situation actually is.  If they don’t, viewers are forced to conclude that the characters don’t care…and that’s liable to make the viewers not care, either.  For that reason, it really helps to have one or more characters act in the viewer analog position—people who don’t know, but want to know, and are working to figure things out just like we the viewers are.  Then we can learn along with them.  We can feel the reward of figuring something out just before the character; we have a backstop to tell us the situation if we’re slower on the uptake.  It’s awfully hard to tell a detective story without a detective.

So:  on to this summer’s bewilderers, in reverse order from air date.

 

Intruders (BBC America, new.  Supernatural drama/mystery/thriller/bewilderer.)

Watched:  First four episodes

Premise:  It is possible, under some (as-yet hazy) circumstances, to gain immortality by inhabiting the bodies of others.  Conspiracy ensues.

Promise:  The showrunner for the series is genre/conspiracy big-name Glen Morgan and is based on a book, and at the start I felt keenly just how much the series’ creators knew that they weren’t telling me.  But by the end of the second episode, I felt like I was starting to get a handle on the key elements of the mystery.  I wish the pilot had been two hours, encompassing both of the first two episodes—it was a real gamble to assume that people would come back after a pretty baffling first hour.  Basically, we get the story in several fragments, each of which we follow.  There are three main fragments:  (1) A former cop (played by John Simm, by now well-versed at playing a sensible cop thrust into a situation that makes no sense), wonders why his wife is acting so strange, and begins to investigate; (2) a little girl experiences a very dramatic personality change; and (3) a mysterious man (played  by James Frain, well-versed at playing the enforcer of shadowy conspiracies) goes around killing people, presumably in service of a conspiracy.  We learn more about each of these in drips and drabs over the next several episodes, and despite the intrusive and sometimes manipulative soundtrack—par for the course in BBC shows—it’s a good mystery, and sometimes genuinely creepy, albeit in a different way from its X-Files pedigree.  Some clues seem trite, for example the unexplained recurrence of the number nine—but overall, it works.  We wonder what’s going on, and as we learn more about what’s going on (mostly through the eyes of Simm’s investigator), we begin to realize that even once the mystery is solved, there’s a significant problem to fix.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t note the gender dynamics, though.  There are absolutely no female characters with agency in this story.  It’s about men trying to figure out and/or influence what’s happening in women’s lives.  Simm’s character is possessive about trying to figure out his wife’s situation; he is chiefly concerned that she’s been disloyal and/or taken away from him, rather than being concerned for her welfare per se.  The little girl is literally possessed by an adult man (which is an impressive acting feat, and kudos to the young actress, but regardless it entirely removes the female character’s agency), and her mother (a minor character, but I’m trying to be complete here) is entirely defined by her motherhood and distress about her daughter.  To the extent other women appear, which is pretty rare, they’re almost all victims, and almost all present to demonstrate things about the male characters.   I’m not saying this dynamic kills the show for me, but it certainly highlights how easy it is to eliminate women’s voices.

Verdict:  Considerably better than the pilot might lead one to expect.

Outlander (Starz, new.  Costume romance, bewilderer.)

Watched: first two episodes (so far)

Premise:  English WWII combat nurse finds herself mysteriously transported to 1743 Scotland.

Promise:  Another book adaptation (this one of Diana Gabaldon’s series) by a big-name genre showrunner, this time Ron Moore.  Not having read the books, I can’t tell how much my critiques are of the show as opposed to the source material, but my reaction is that this show is quite good, but misses the opportunity to be really great.  It has the wonderful bewilderer premise of time travel into history, and it travels to a beautiful and dynamic time and place.  It has glorious production values and lush looks...but it also has a lot of intrusive narration.  I see why the narration is there—it gives us insight into the heroine’s mental process, which we can’t get otherwise because she doesn’t (and can’t) have any confidantes, but at the same time, I can’t shake the feeling that the narration is a crutch.  I’d rather it were less intrusive, a la Call the Midwife. 

More to the point, unlike the time travel shows I’ve loved—Continuum and Life on Mars, for example—this show is less about the problems that our hero(ine) has to solve upon landing than about the romance (literal and figurative) our heroine finds there.  I don’t have anything against romance, per se, and once I accepted that that’s what this show was, I really enjoyed it.  It’s just that with a female protagonist like this one—smart, capable, in possession of her own sexuality—I’d love to see her do more than define herself by the men around her.  And to say that’s all she does may actually be selling the show short.  In fact, our heroine is not only a very capable but also a self-possessed person, and she does a fine job of protecting herself in a society that puts her automatically at risk.  But—much like the time-travel heroine in Continuum, she is competent and confident, and being thrown out of her element will likely force her to examine certain beliefs she’s always held.  Like the hero of Life on Mars, she has to transform herself in order to survive in an often-hostile culture.  But unlike those shows, our heroine has no real goal in the past other than survival,  which (a) is considerably less interesting than, say, solving crime, and (b) puts her more obviously at the mercy of her environment, with little choice but to rely on a benevolent (and generally male) rescuer.   So I just wish all of that self-possession came with a little bit more self-direction.  Or, put differently, this show makes me yearn to see the television adaptation of Connie Willis’s historians, who are messy and confused and have goals and make mistakes.

Verdict:  An enjoyable romance.

The Leftovers (HBO, new.  Post-apocalyptic supernatural drama/bewilderer.)

Watched: pilot

Premise:  Three years after the unexplained rapture-esque disappearance of 2% of humanity, those who remain strive to find a new “normal.”

Promise: Another day, another adaptation of a book by a genre big-name, this one Damon Lindelof.  I literally spent days after watching this pilot obsessing over why I thought it was so terrible.  So many reasons jumped to mind:  First, the show is almost psychedelically angry and humorless.  Second, after an hour and a half of virtually plot-free character introductions, we had virtually no sense at all who the characters were, how they differed from cardboard archetypes, what their wants or needs were, and why we should care about them.  Nearly all of them were uncurious in the extreme, and almost no one communicated with anyone else.  Some of the central characters are part of a cult that doesn’t talk.  (They also, for reasons we’re never told, wear all white and smoke a lot.)  And we really don’t know anything meaningful about them, because (can you guess why?) they don’t talk.  And yet, we know more about them than about pretty much anyone else on the show.  So that’s a second problem, and really those would be problems enough.  But I’m just getting started.  The show was severely overdramatized.  The central conceit—the disappearance of a meaningful, yet small, portion of the population—could be really interesting, but it’s one of those SF “change one thing” premises that seems much more likely to have a million transformational butterfly effects than to create a post-apocalyptic cultscape.  Yet that’s what we were presented with—a lot of people still reeling from the disappearance years later, and rabid dogs wandering the streets, and a proliferation of bizarre cults, although surprisingly little apparent activity from traditional Christians, who I would expect to have field day with this thing.  Also, the majority of the women on the show have literally had their voices taken away by their (off-screen and/or ill-explained) decision to join this non-speaking cult. Could it seriously be true that in a cast this large, the female on the show we know the most about (aside from mere victimhood), is a young woman whose only known traits are that one of the cult leaders values her and she likes shows like The Bachelor?  Well, that was my impression, at least.

I could go on and on with complaints like this.  And I have, in various conversations with friends, but I won’t burden you with them here.  I’ll just add my two biggest complaints, either one of which is independently a show-killer.  The first is that the characters know a lot of information that the viewers didn’t know.  I don’t mean that there’s a mystery or conspiracy that some people know about and we (along with one or more searchers) have to find out more about it.  I mean that they all know what these cults are about, what the big issues are in this world, what their personal histories are, etc.--and they just aren’t telling us.  I presume this stuff will get doled out as if it were a central mystery.  But without an audience-analog character to follow along with, it’s not a mystery.  It’s just playing “hide the ball” with the audience.  And finally, the show isn’t about anything.  There’s no theme.  I’ve read interviews claiming that it’s about “finding the new normal,” but (a) that’s not a very interesting theme; and (b) if I couldn’t intuit any thematic thrust from the pilot without going to read interviews, it wasn’t much in evidence.  The theme seemed to me to be “a bunch of unconnected things the show’s creator thought were cool and weird,” which is, um, not a theme.

Verdict:  I really planned to watch a couple more episodes so give this show a fair shake.  Maybe it gets better, I thought.  With such a large cast, I thought, maybe there just wasn’t time in the pilot for the show to find its feet.  Maybe there is a theme there, and interesting people, and an explanation of why the world took this disaster so very hard, I thought.  But I just couldn't muster the energy.

On the DVR/Unreviewed:  Dominion, Tyrant, The Almighty Johnsons, The Divide, Manhattan, The Knick, Legends, Z Nation.  That's a lot to get to before the Fall season launches in.  But I'll do my best...