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.
