A Few SimonBakers

There hasn’t been a good moment to talk about the shows from mid/late 2014 and early 2015 that I haven’t watched and won’t watch.  So now is that moment.  As a reminder, I assign Simon Bakers, on a scale of 1-5, as a measure of judgment of a show I haven’t seen.  One Simon Baker is “I would have watched this if I’d had time/energy/DVR space.”  Five Simon Bakers is “only some combination of large amounts of money and toothpicks keeping my eyelids open would make me watch this voluntarily.”

I don’t see many obvious commonalities among these three shows, except that all seem to me like they’ll be emotionally manipulative.  And I’m just not up for emotional manipulation.

Tyrant (FX, drama, premiered June 2014). One SimonBaker.

Premise:  The son of a tyrannical dictator, after living in self-imposed exile as a pediatrician in the U.S., reluctantly returns to his fictional home country and attempts to guide the nation’s future by influencing its new leader, his brutal and unstable older brother.   

Prejudice:  By all accounts, it’s thought-provoking, if not necessarily easy to watch.  But it’s been pretty roundly criticized on a few counts, including its treatment of women as storytelling tools—victims to demonstrate men’s evil—rather than as people.  It’s also been criticized for relying on ethnic stereotypes and for having a dull lead.  So for weeks, it languished on my DVR, and the thought of starting it felt like homework.  I wish I had had the time and energy to give it a try—if only to decide whether I agreed with the criticism—but I know it would demand more energy than I have to give it.

Red Band Society (Fox, premiered Sept. 2014.  Dramedy.  Canceled.)  One SimonBaker.

Premise:  Poignant dramedy about the lives of patients on a cancer ward.  Based on a Spanish/Catalan series.

Prejudice:  It was hard for me to square the depressing-sounding setting with the Glee-like tone of the series’ ads.  I enjoyed Glee for a while, but lost interest, and wasn’t looking forward to having to dodge the feeling of doom, sap, and emotional manipulation that I figured would inevitably loom over the whole production.  It’s been canceled now, so I assume others felt as I did—but I’m still a little sad I didn’t have the DVR space to check it out.

The Slap (NBC, new, drama, limited series.)  Three SimonBakers.

Premise:  The fallout that follows when a man slaps a child at a suburban barbecue.  Based on an Australian novel and series.

Prejudice:  This hasn’t aired yet, but I know I won’t watch it.  It has a skilled cast and looks like it is, or at least wants to be, high-quality television.  But it’s also built on such an emotionally charged and manipulative premise that it gives me a sense of dread and skin-crawly anxiety just to think about watching it.  I don’t mean to say that I want stories to have easy rights and wrongs.  I often enjoy stories with moral grey areas.  But this isn’t grey.  It’s black and white in polarizing directions and I’m not touching it with a 10-foot pole.

On the DVR:  Still too many to contemplate…