Childlike Wonder

I sometimes find myself drawn to stories of improbably competent young people—kids, teens, etc.—facing challenges beyond their years.  They’re able to face those challenges with a combination of naïvete and poor impulse control which makes their skill and maturity all the more impressive.  I suspect that’s why I watch so much anime: it frequently features teens being thrown into ridiculously high degree of difficulty responsibilities and having, or developing, the skills to handle them while retaining their youthful emotions.  I’m not sure why I find it so appealing—perhaps it’s because, in a life of mundane adult responsibilities, I feel nostalgia in those little moments when I reencounter my own youthful wonder.  Or perhaps I just enjoy precociousness.

In any case, the networks keep trying to make us want to watch shows about magical children, but—perhaps because feeling the childlike wonder is even better than watching it—I’m more drawn to Cosmos than to any of them.

Star-Crossed (CW, new.  Supernatural drama.)

Watched: Pilot

Premise: Ten years after aliens land on the planet and are forcibly segregated from human society, several alien children are sent to human high school.

Promise:  The show is a sort of Roswell meets Romeo and Juliet.  The setup goes like this:  In earth’s near future, when technology is advanced but not that advanced, aliens land on earth, and the world’s most inattentive parents let their little girl protect an alien child, who is ultimately captured, and we presume, killed.  But years later, when he’s a hunky teen, he and several other alien teens are integrated into human high school as a social experiment.  Surprise surprise, our little girl has grown up to be quite a comely teen herself.  Cross-cultural (indeed, cross-species!) teen drama ensues.  The aliens have some vague magic powers (healing, it seems), but mostly they’re like regular humans, but with markings on their faces, which is no doubt very convenient for the hair & makeup department.

It’s a fine setup, and like a lot of science fiction, it provides a laboratory for exploring current social issues out of their politically-charged contexts.  Here, naturally, the show dives into xenophobia, racism, and the immigration debate with gusto.  It’s not even a little bit subtle.  The internment camp the aliens are confined in is a chilling reminder of Japanese internment, and the introduction of the alien teens into the school so explicitly recalls the Arkansas National Guard-assisted desegregation of Central High School in 1957 that I found it hard to watch.  My instinct is to reject it as not only trivializing those difficult historical events, but also—by forcing the comparison—troublingly likening immigrants and racial minorities to space aliens.  That said, the show so ardently pounds the viewer over the head with the “these aliens are different and have different experiences, but inside they have many of the same wants and needs as us” message that I feel like it heart, at least, is in the right place.  But the show is far from immune to subtle expressions of current-day racism, as the Black Best Friend announces to our main character that one of the cliques at school is the “Asian Fashionistas:  they never wear the same thing twice,” and we are treated to a brief glimpse of mini-skirted young Asian women comparing tiny cell phones. 

Even if that weren’t a problem, the show’s basic plots are cut from standard CW cloth, without much innovation.  That’s not a bad thing:  love triangles, popularity, loyalty to friends, risky teen behavior and boundary testing are classics for a reason.  But I never felt that there was anything sufficiently special about these characters or their situations—aside from the social commentary—to make me care about them.  And if you don’t care about the characters, you’ll never tolerate the challenging social commentary.

Verdict:  I’d probably watch more if I had time, but it’s fallen by the wayside.

Believe (NBC, new.  Supernatural drama.)

Watched: pilot

Premise:  A ragtag crew and an escaped death row inmate protect a powerfully psychic but otherwise normal tween girl from the shadowy forces that hunt her.

Promise:  This show is very similar, in both tone and effectiveness, to Touch.  The premise isn’t identical, but there are a lot of commonalities.  Both shows could easily be described thus:  a child with supernatural abilities, who has naïve and benevolent priorities, requires protection against shadowy forces that wish to harness the child’s powers for their own selfish aims.  This time, the child isn’t an autistic boy, but a tween girl with ill-defined, but very powerful, psychic powers that emerge when she becomes emotional.  Two groups are fighting over her:  one wants to kill and/or control her, the other wants to protect her, because “whoever controls her abilities will control the world.”  This, of course, presumes that the person who controls her abilities won’t be her.  To be clear, the girl is not entirely without agency.  In fact, she seems to care deeply (albeit perhaps indiscriminately) about people’s well-being, and she’s actually quite good at protecting herself and others…so why, again, do we need this ragtag troupe of protectors? They, in turn, seem to treat her wants as annoyances more than anything else, which effectively makes her a maguffin.  Which is odd:  if they value her, they should value her, you know?

Like Touch and The Listener and Medium and The Ghost Whisperer and various other psychic-driven shows, the plot is very deeply coincidence-driven, and the girl’s mystical beneficence gets a bit wearying.  I’m actually surprised that the writers don’t hail from any of those shows; in fact the critical mass seems to have come from Last Resort.  This is perhaps more coherent than that show was (although it still holds a soft spot in my heart), but there’s a healthy dose of that interactive television mainstay, “but wait, why did they ___.” But the main sticking point for me is that I keep wanting the girl to be more self-aware, and her protectors to be more respectful of her skills and needs.  In fact, if the “good guys” who were trying to protect her actually turned out to be “bad guys” I think I would like it better.  But I’m sure they won’t.

Verdict:  I think it has the potential be outstanding interactive television.  But without the interactivity, I don’t think it holds long-term interest.

Resurrection (ABC, new.  Supernatural drama.)

Watched: pilot

Premise: Long-dead people return to the town of Arcadia, Missouri.

Promise: As you know, I reallyliked Les Revenants, the French show from which this is adapted.   But the show felt very French—I can’t put my finger on what that means, but whatever it was, I felt it—which makes me very skeptical of the American TV system’s ability to adapt it without losing so much of what makes it work.  American TV is good at a lot of things, but meditative detachment isn’t really one of them, and Les Revenants had that in spades.  It was bona fide horror, partly because it had so much bleak silence and slow reveal.  This version doesn’t feel quite like horror, although it is mysterious and sometimes creepy.  But in the French version, each return felt deeply spooky; in this one, they feel miraculous.  In the French one the prevailing feeling was what the heck is going on here, while this one feels mysterious in a similarly unknown, but much less baffling way.  Overall the mood is very much like Under the Dome. 

I think the reason for the difference in mood has a lot to do with the musical scoring—the French score had a hollow, suspenseful beauty, and this one has a lot more swells and comfort.  But it’s also plot-driven:  the French version essentially began with a 15-year-old girl wandering alone into her now-divorced parents’ house, without any explanation, after she’d been dead for four years.  This one begins with an Immigration agent bringing a young boy back to his parents, 30 years after he died.  Both involve supernatural kids, but the mood is radically different; the mere fact that there are authorities looking into this thing from the start makes it a whole different show. In fact, the mere fact that this little town seems to be part of a broader world makes it a whole different show. 

But if one moves away from the comparison, I think this show has potential, much along the lines of Under the Dome.  We’ll have to see how this town deals with the situation , and no doubt reasonable minds will disagree.  And not all of the people who return will be welcome, and the adjustment will be difficult.  A lot remains to seen, particularly how sinister the returned turn out to be (and they could turn out to be pretty darn sinister.)  So I see promise, even if that promise is different from the haunting isolation of Les Revenants.

Verdict: Worth checking out, but it remains to be seen whether it follows through.

Cosmos (Fox, new.  Documentary.)

Watched: First episode

Premise: Reboot of the 1980 Carl Sagan classic

Promise: I LOVED Cosmos on PBS when I was a kid. (Aaand now I’ve given you some indication of my age.)  My parents and I watched it together, one of the few instances when we treated television as a family event.  It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Cosmos was what made me think that I could enjoy science.  I loved that it included the history of scientific discovery, describing how people got it wrong before they got it right, and explaining why their wrong versions weren’t all that illogical, but the right versions were better.  It made the scientific method seem at once magical and achievable, and it encouraged us to explore our sources of wonder.  This show works the same way, but with Neil DeGrasse Tyson taking the Sagan role. 

It tackles the challenge, as Sagan’s did, of pitching to all ages and knowledge levels, and mostly does a good job of talking even to beginners without talking down at the more knowledgeable. And it’s visually stunning, reminding us that television technology has really improved in the last 34 years.  (Wow, that seems like a long time.)  Even more than that, demonstrates how much science we’ve learned even in the last 34 years.  It gets preachy every so often, but I can forgive it, because it’s just so cool.

Verdict:  Recommended.  Fun to watch alone, but—I expect—even better to watch with your kids.

On the DVR/Unreviewed:  It's nearing the time for some Simon Bakers, I believe.  The Assets is over, and Under the Gunn (which I've been enjoying) is nearly so, I think.  also The Red Road and Sirens.

Blurring the Hero Line

Perfection is kinda boring.  It's inevitably true that flawed heroes are more interesting than perfect ones.  In fact, perfect heroes, like perfect anythings, are pretty insufferable.  So we shouldn’t be surprised when TV good guys have issues—they make bad decisions in the service of good aims; they engage in self-destructive or hurtful behavior; they break rules and piss people off.  But if we expect our good guys to have problems, how do we know they’re good guys?  We have to be able to trust that they mean well and that, when push comes to shove, they’ll do the right thing even when—especially when—it’s not the easy thing.   That trust is crucial, as it provides the viewer with a tether to your hero’s heroism.  But it also provides TV creators with a challenge:  how to make a flawed hero who we still trust.  It's not an easy line to walk, and shows sometimes push the boundary on purpose to keep us guessing.  They want us to believe that we’re watching good guys, but they also want us to think there’s a genuine risk that when the rubber hits the road, our heroes won’t do the right thing.  And that, in my experience, is asking too much.  You need the trust.  Take it away and you no longer have a good guy, you just have a guy. 

A few shows lately have tried to walk that line.  How are they faring?

Chicago PD (NBC, new.  Law enforcement drama.)

Watched: pilot.

Premise:  The exploits of an intelligence unit in the Chicago police department.

Promise:  I watched this (and summarily abandoned it) a long time ago, but it’s taken me a while to get up the energy to review it.  It’s a spin-off from Chicago Fire, and it has the same mood—what I’d call “soap under fire.”  Emotional and political entanglements and tensions are heightened by the characters’ dangerous and/or urgent surroundings, which is supposed to give everything a more vivid intensity.  I’m not averse to the mood, in principle—ER did it well, years ago, and coincidentally was set in Chicago too.  Perhaps the best of these I can recall, and it was wonderful, was Oz.  But for the format to work, you have to care about the characters, and you need real protagonists to root for and antagonists to root against.  Chicago PD, at least on first watching, didn’thave either of these.  What it had instead was a troubling “enforcement at any cost” law enforcement model, where police are lionized for their moral ambiguity and willingness to cross civil rights boundaries to stop the bad guys.  I’m not saying the bad guys aren’t bad, or shouldn’t be stopped—but over and over, we’re being fed the message that civil and human rights are impediments to justice, rather than crucial elements of it.  That’s deeply, viscerally disturbing.

There’s also a racial dynamic to this show that someone should have caught – a bunch of white cops policing drug crime in black communities.  One of the cops is Hispanic, and there’s an Asian tech officer (sigh) but otherwise it’s a very, very white cast.  I suppose it’s possible that that matches the demographics of Chicago law enforcement, but I want television to better. 

Verdict:  I’d yawn, but I’m too troubled to.

Mind Games (ABC, new.  Heist procedural.)

Watched: First two episodes

Premise:  Two brothers--an ex-con (Christian Slater) and a bipolar former professor (Steve Zahn) start a persuasion firm.

Promise:  Like Lie To Me, Scandal, Leverage, and Hustle, this is a show about a team of smart manipulators who—and this is very fortunate for all of us—use their powers for good rather than ill.  Here, their power is the Jedi Mind Trick:  using various persuasion tactics to create positive outcomes for their clients.  Or to put it differently, they're somewhere between con men, mentalists, and advertisers.  Within the con/heist genre, where the show rests pretty comfortably, the show’s soul is closer to Scandal’s than Leverage’s:  Their clients are, generally speaking, sympathetic and need help, but while our heroes’ methods are more legal than the Leverage team’s, their motives are more morally ambiguous and their methods are more consistently troubling.  In Leverage, they’re all “bad guys” in the sense that they do illegal things, but they’re good guys—that is, we trust them implicitly—because they have good hearts and aren’t willing to hurt each other.  In Mind Games, like Scandal, they’ve spent so much time dancing on the trust line that they may not know when they cross it.  That puts a lot of weight on the show’s “conscience” characters, who on one hand are the “us” of the cast, but on the other hand can very easily seem like harping nags.   That said, each episode involves the team cleverly surmounting what seem like impossible odds, and we care about the outcome as well as the characters’ moral health and potential for redemption.  I’d just like to see the groundwork for a little more trust.  (Not to mention some plot attention to the show’s supporting characters, although I presume that’ll come later.)

Finally, two unrelated observations emerge from the first two episodes:

(1) Steve Zahn is great as the naive, bipolar brother, although we’ve really only seen him in a manic phase.  I honestly don’t know if I want to see him be that good in a depressed phase.

(2)  Jazz flute is the universal soundtrack to con games.

Verdict:  I love watching them be smart and competent, but I don’t particularly like watching them be deceitful to each other.  I’ll keep watching until I figure out which they do more of, or until I get bored, whichever comes first.

 

Those Who Kill (A&E, new.  Law enforcement procedural.)

Watched: pilot

Premise:  Obsessive Pittsburgh detective and mercurial civilian profiler play cat- and mouse- with serial killers. 

Promise:  This show is adapted from the Danish, and is just as moody as (although less atmospheric than) its fellow Dane, The Killing.  Like The Killing, it centers on a woman who’s trying to overcome the darkness in her own soul and the difficulty of her past by stopping the bad guys—but not necessarily by making the world a better or happier place.  It reminds me a lot of Homeland—Chloe Sevigny’s character is the one person dedicated (and crazy) enough to pursue this bad guys in her self-destructive, obsessive way.  It’s moody and glum and bleak and although the heroine is a deeply competent investigator, she’s not really someone you’d want to hang out with. She's interesting enough, but not necessarily fun enough to watch.

I’m also a bit tired of watching shows about women whose heroism is borne of victimhood.  Lots of heroes are, of course, driven by trauma.  Batman, anyone?  But it occurred to me as I was watching this show that when women are trauma-driven heroes, it’s generally about a trauma that happened to them—whereas when men are trauma-driven heroes, it’s generally about a trauma that happened to someone else, someone they couldn’t save (and in fact often a woman or a child).  There may well be female heroes out there who are motivated by some trauma that happened to someone else, rather than to themselves…but none come to mind right now.  And that means our heroines are, automatically, also victims and revengers.  Can’t they be just heroes?  

Verdict:  I may give it another episode or two, or I may wander off.   

On the DVR/Unreviewed:  The Assets, Under the Gunn, Star-Crossed, The Red Road.