It’s not TV, it’s premium television

“Premium television”—that is, television that airs on channels supported by subscription payment rather than interstitial advertising—benefits from its medium in a few important ways.  Foremost among these is that it doesn’t have to pander to advertisers, which means it doesn’t have to rely on episode-by-episode ratings.  This means that stories can unspool at varying paces—if any particular episode (or even show) gets a lower rating, it doesn’t matter, as long as people are still subscribing.  This creates an incentive to take greater risks, in the hope that for every flop there’s something that inspires people to subscribe just to watch it.  The failures don’t matter as much as the successes.  This, and the fact that they have a more dependable income stream, permits them to pay higher production costs and order and film entire seasons’ worth of television before they air, rather than just ordering pilots—if a season does well, they can order a second season.  If it doesn’t, they’ve only lost their costs, not their income stream.  One result is that a premium television series is more likely to be a “concept album” rather than the collection of singles we’ve come to expect from network television.   Other benefits include the fact that premium shows needn’t break their act structure into such regimented segments order to allow for interstitial advertising, and that they’re not governed by the same decency regulations as most broadcast television, which provides freedom to use swear words and adult themes and to show people’s bodies. 

But while each of these creates a fun sandbox for tv creators, collectively they can easily make a mixed bag for viewers.  Sometimes they make transcendent storytelling that wouldn’t be possible any other way.  But sometimes…there’s something magical about a perfect single, or a perfect episode of television, and I’d argue that one is slightly less likely to get that from a premium series than from a network or basic cable series.  The blessing of permitting grand arcs goes hand in hand with the curse of slow-moving plots and boring episodes.  The blessings of higher production budgets and a more liberal act structure go hand in hand with the curses of self-indulgence and episode bloat.  The blessing of uncensored storytelling goes hand in hand with the curse of gratuitous swearing and sex, and—all too often—more explicit misogyny.

How do this season’s new premium shows fare?

Looking (HBO, new.  Half-hour dramedy.)

Watched: First 4 episodes

Premise: Slices of the lives of three gay men in current-day Bay Area.

Promise: This show is part of that genre of half-hour shows that’s more observational than funny.  It’s the length of a sitcom, but doesn’t aim for laughs.  Instead, it aims for fond, often poignant observation of its characters’ sometimes-funny lives.  It achieves that, in a naturalistic and understated way.  Other commentators have remarked that the show is a sign of importantly changing times:  it’s a matter-of-fact show about gay characters, without the sexualized flamboyance that has generally accompanied “gay dramas” like Queer as Folk or The L Word.   It doesn’t need to represent every kind of gay man in the world—it just has to tell the story of these particular gay men.  In a way, that makes it more groundbreaking than its genre cousins about straight women:  Sex in the City and Girls have each, mostly, presented archetypes.  (Even without being a regular viewer, I can say with some certainty that I’m a Miranda.)  But—like its cousins—it doesn’t tell stories about the parts of life I most want to see.  Its characters seem largely incapable of – or at least uninterested in -- making any decision that the show doesn’t instantly relate back to sex or relationships.  On the upside, that puts this show matter-of-factly in a genre previously usually reserved for shows about straight people.  It is a very, very close relative of Girls.  But for exactly the same reason, it focuses the show on a group of people and events I can’t really identify much with.

I’m glad I followed the recommendation that we watch beyond the first two episodes.  The characters became more multi-dimensional and more likeable, and we met a couple of supporting characters that give the show depth.  But the characters’ decisions remained unsatisfying—not wrong, exactly, just based on a set of priorities that seem unambitious and hormone-driven.  Like the characters in Girls, I just found myself asking why they weren’t past all this.  But for all of that, it’s a kind treatment of their lives—a leisurely character study of people who, while not enviable, are often likeable.

Verdict:  I find the characters likeable enough that if I had infinite time, I'd probably watch more reliably.  As it is, I suspect I'll only check in once in a while.

Black Sails (Starz, new.  Adventure/Drama)

Watched: Episode 1

Premise: Pirates connive in the early 18^th century.

Promise:  I was really looking forward to this show.  Pirates are exciting, and the promos looked like a great mix of the pirate ethos with Starz' freedom to tell unfettered stories.  I had high hopes that it'd be sexy and gritty, with lots of team-y camaraderie and chosen family, and lots of bellowing.  Premise-wise, it's a nifty mix of fiction and legend:  it features fictionalized versions of some real pirates (like Charles Vane and Anne Bonny), but fundamentally, it’s a prequel to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.  (Long) John Silver is a young man here, and the show focuses on the exploits of the Walrus under the command of Captain Flint.  

I was a bit disappointed.  The setting is the world of classic swashbuckling piracy, but grittier and bloodier and boobs-ier, because this is Starz and that’s what they do. But although the setting buckles swash, the plot is far more political than I’d expected—our pirate anti-heroes are contextualized in a changing world of merchant commerce, and their role in the global economy—and the machinations required to keep them there—are the driving forces behind the show, as are power struggles and deceit both inter-ship and intra-ship.  The first episode, for example, is concerned primarily with what I would characterize as a labor dispute.  It’s resolved in a deeply pirate-y way, but so—if we’re to believe the Hoffa conspirators—are certain labor disputes.  In other words:  I expected Strike Back, and I got The Sopranos.  Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, just not what I expected.  But even if I found it easy to adjust, I would still find the show slower-moving, and more focused on the intrigue than the adventure, than I’d prefer.  At this pace, in fact, I feel like I could probably skip an episode or two and not have trouble catching up.  It feels like serious television, but that’s sort of the problem:  there’s no twinkle in this show’s eye.  I want them to be having more fun.

For other shows in this situation, I’d want to watch more to see if it picks up--whether the camaraderie and chosen family start to shine, whether the adventure gets more adventuresome.  But I have to admit that I'm influenced here by reputation:  I’m told that the sexual dynamic moves quickly from interesting to troubling.  In the first episode, the show’s few women actually wield great power—some political, some conniving, some at the tip of a sword, and some sexual—and the result is that all of the women on the show are portrayed as either politically or sexually aggressive, or (and this is true of most of them) both.  One of them—a tavern-owning heiress who dives into the political fray—is delightful.  But apparently the show gets rape-ier. In a show about pirates, I don’t find that remotely surprising, and in fact I would be a bit surprised if it didn’t—but I fear that watching more would already be a bit of a slog, without the extra work of having to assess whether the rape culture is sufficiently problematized.  So while I find the show intriguing enough to want to know where it goes, I'm not willing watch a bunch of rape to find out.

Verdict:  Signing off, with some regret.

True Detective (HBO, new.  Law enforcement drama)

Watched: First three episodes

Premise:  Two detectives with differing approaches are faced with a puzzling and heinous crime; told through interviews and retrospective flashbacks as new detectives investigate a similar crime.

Promise:  This show is as much a character study of its principals as it is a mystery, but it accomplishes both with spare poeticism, both visually and linguistically.  The pace is extremely slow, but it feels like the right pace for its intimate inspection of the Louisiana detectives and the crime they investigated. 

It’s not exactly new, but it epitomizes a trend toward dark, murky crimes whose solutions require the detectives to undertake uncomfortable psychological exploration.  The show’s mystery reminds me of The Killing (particularly the third season):  an exploration of bleaker sides of humanity, with a convoluted and gradual directionality that doesn’t give much away.  Its character study reminds me of Broadchurch—in addition to its more traditional mystery element, it’s also a story about two detectives facing their preconceptions and learning to cope with each other personally and professionally.  This show’s detectives are very different from Broadchurch’s—they are both deeply problematic people, and the show doesn’t shy away from their weaknesses and hypocracies—but like Broadchurch, it focuses heavily on the interaction between these detectives and how the crime, and their interaction surrounding it, influenced who they became.  For a show who’s central crime is a gruesome rape/murder, it’s surprisingly deft:  although its (relatively few) female characters exist predominantly as foils (victims, motivators, or challenges) for the male leads, the show never endorses that vision of womanhood, only acknowledges that that’s how the leads view the world.   It recognizes that in many ways men are the gatekeepers of rape culture; and it’s subtly, but sharply critical of male possessiveness. 

I should also mention the acting.  It’s great.  The characters walk a difficult line as problematic heroes—they can’t be likeable, but they can’t be loathsome either.  Considering the laconic nature of both detectives, a lot of the characterization relies on body language, and it’s very effective.   The show’s drive comes not only from the whodunit (and the whytheydunit) but also from the central question of how these two men went from the ones who investigated the crime 17 years ago to the ones being interviewed today.  And as much as the crime, that character question is the one we want to solve.

                                                                                                                               

Verdict: Not always easy to watch, but consistently rewarding.  Recommended.

On the DVR/Unreviewed:  Too much.  Other obligations have intervened, slowing me down.  As a result, (a) I'm exercising my discretion to skip new sitcoms; and (b) pretty soon I'll probably be issuing some SimonBakers.  But what's waiting for a review, or something?  Hmm, let's see:  The Assets, Chicago PD, Under The Gunn, Star-Crossed, and Mind Games.

Too Little Information

I love a show with a good central mystery.  I’ll even enjoy a show that makes me wonder what the heck is going on.  The Prisoner, is of course, a classic of this genre, and I'm a fan.  I think I’m one of literally dozens of people who actually kind of enjoyed the baffling surrealism of Push, Nevada as a story rather than a simply a novelty.  I enjoyed trying to figure out what was happening in Persons Unknown.  And—although here I’ll admit that my enjoyment was largely driven by the friends I watched it with—I adored Nowhere Man.  But there’s a crucially important line between creating mystery (good) and simply providing too little information (bad).  While it’s fun to make the characters and audience wonder—and indeed, that wonder is central to any mystery, be it a single episode arc of a procedural or a massive conspiracy series—that wonder won't happen at all without enough information to know what they’re being asked to solve, and how they might solve it. 

I’ll admit, I’m drawing a fine line here.  For my taste, Lost walked right along that line—I enjoyed wondering what was going on until I stopped enjoying it and started feeling vaguely abused by the slow drip of information, and wandered away from the show.   I think the answer is that something needs to be explained in its entirety.  Perhaps it’s who the characters are and why we care about them and their motivations.  Perhaps it’s a set of really interesting or identifiable facts about their world or the challenge they’re facing.  Perhaps it’s the unique set of rules they have to live by.  But if you don’t give us at least one of those to grab on to, we won’t be intrigued enough to care about the mystery…we’ll just be bored.  Or to put it differently:  One of the things that makes whodunnits work so well is that we know—or think we know—exactly what happened, we just don’t know why and/or by whom.  If a show is taking away the “what” portion of “who, what, when, where, and why,” it’d better give us a who—and probably a where and a why—that are well defined enough to make us care.  Or differently still:  the more hooks you take away, the more gripping the few remaining hooks have to be to keep us hooked.

Two new SyFy shows try their hands at the “too little information” approach, with mixed results:

Bitten (Syfy, new.  Supernatural drama.)

Watched: pilot

Premise:  Female werewolf returns to her rural hometown to help track a rogue werewolf.

Promise:  This show is in the time slot after Lost Girl, and it makes gestures toward having a similarly pansexual feel.  But it doesn’t have the same sense of ridiculous fun that makes Lost Girl so effective.  Nor—although the pilot has a half dozen scenes with people in bed, clearly either before or after sex—does it capture the lustful appeal of True Blood.  Instead, it aims for the soapy seriousness of Revenge.  And like Revenge, the pilot provides a scenario, but very little explanation of its characters’ motives and even less about the stakes.  In fact, the pilot spends nearly the whole hour in the modern, urban (and closeted, werewolf-wise) life that our heroine leaves in the episode’s last five minutes.  We are led to believe that the rest of the season takes place in a place we’ve seen for 5 minutes, with characters we’ve hardly met.  We understand that this rogue (a “mutt,” as they call him) must be stopped because he’s killing innocent women, and we know he MUST be a bad guy because in our very first encounter with him he calls a woman a “slut.”  (Or at least that was my reaction to the scene—I disliked him immediately).  But that’s about all we know.  We don’t know anything about how or why werewolves exist, what makes them turn into wolves according to this world’s mythology (it doesn’t seem to be lunar), or why there’s only one female werewolf in existence—something that seems important to the characters, but we’re given no sense of why.  We have no idea why our heroine dislikes her family/pack, nor are we given any indication of why she needs to be involved in this hunt.  In other words, the whole thing is just ill-explained.

Verdict:  I was willing to give it a second episode, but the small remaining space on my DVR was not.  Bye bye, show. 

Helix (SyFy, new.  Horror/Thriller.)

Watched: 2-part premiere plus three episodes

Premise:  CDC scientists go to an artic outpost to explore a possible pathogen outbreak.  Instead they find creepy, dangerous genetic experiments.

Promise:  There isn’t a whole lot of horror qua horror on television right now.  Walking Dead qualifies.  Les Revenants does too.  I’ve heard decent things about this season of American Horror Story, although I don’t watch it myself.  Mostly, though, the current horror-tinged TV series I can think of are either psychological thriller (see, e.g., The Following) or supernatural drama (like Grimm).  So this series—in which, basically, an intelligent contagion threatens to turn all of humanity into zombie vectors, a la 28 Days Later—fills a niche.  And it knows its genre:  it’s suspenseful, creepy, and occasionally gross.  But that sort of horror also depends on being scary, and it doesn’t necessarily live up to the scariness part.  I think that’s a function of pacing:  the action is quite slow, as is the pace of information flow—and yet it sometimes like we’re rushing through key details.  In the two-part premiere, for example, I found myself asking “who is that, again?” more often than I’d have preferred. 

The show’s suspense is largely built on incomplete information, so a complete information dump would undermine the show’s concept.  But this show leaves out so much information that it takes several episodes to start to care.  And even then, we end up caring more about the mystery than the characters, most of whom are never given more than one or two dimensions.  It fills that gap with dramatically high stakes—but even the highest stakes may not be enough to make us care.  Honestly, for the first few episodes, I cared only enough that I wanted to have it on in the background during an evening’s work-time, but not so much that I would have been eager to sit and stare at it without anything else going on.  And it’s perhaps not such a good sign that I didn’t feel like the work hamstrung my ability to follow the show.  That said, the mystery ramps up to more-interesting places in episode 4. So, to get back to the information theme:  I find myself wishing that they had revealed a lot of the mystery faster and made the show focus more on how to deal with the problem, rather than focusing exclusively on trying to figure out what the problem is.

Verdict:  Gets more interesting, but still may not necessarily engender caring. 

On the DVR and/or Unreviewed:  The Assets, Chicago PD, True Detective, Under the Gunn, Looking, Black Sails.