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...