Summer Gloom

The Fall season is upon us and the shows are already flooding in.  Depending on how one counts, we’re getting at least 15 new shows in the span of two weeks.  So it’s time to wrap up the summer fare. 

Without any systematic review, my gut feeling is that this summer’s shows have explored, in more depth than I usually associate with summer, just how terrible people can be.  I’m thinking here of UnReal, Wayward Pines, The Whispers, Scream, and Mr. Robot—to name a few—this summer has really plumbed the depths of humanity’s ability to inflict pain on each other.  I’m not necessarily complaining.  The season’s also been pretty intriguing and enjoyable, overall.  I really quite loved UnReal and Scream, and I enjoyed quite a bit about the others (and some not mentioned here).  But my goodness, this summer has given us a dim view of humanity and its prospects.  

The last two summer shows follow in the pattern.  Public Morals seems to have a very dim view indeed, in which the police are sexist, corrupt, and hypocritical, and those are the good guys. Fear The Walking Dead gives us a few brave examples among a sea of the craven and cowardly as society disintegrates.

To be frank, I could use a bit more optimism.  Maybe we’ll get it in the Fall?

Public Morals (TNT, new.  Period law enforcement drama)

Watched:  pilot

Premise: Drama about the “public morals” (read: vice) department of the NYPD in the 1960s.

Promise:  This show hides its sexism behind a veneer of “authenticity” to the period, but it fundamentally embraces the model in which women are all about being protected and placed on a pedestal.  The police and mob are intertwined, and the show is rife with graft and hypocrisy—basically, it’s Life on Mars without the originality, mystery, or critical perspective.

Verdict:  It’s possible that the central drama, provided by the complex relationship between the police and the Irish mob, will become interesting.  Or that the characters and their relationships will become things viewers are likely to care about.  But I was fed up enough after the pilot that I didn’t want to stick around to watch.

Fear the Walking Dead (AMC, new.  Supernatural drama.)

Watched:  first 3 episodes

Premise:  The disintegration of society through the eyes of one family as zombies take over Los Angeles

Promise:  This is a prequel to The Walking Dead, which is Quality Television but I wandered away from it quite early because it sort of bored me.  As for this iteration, I appreciate its subtle storytelling—it gets across the gradual creep of desperation and confusion that no doubt would accompany the arrival of the zombie apocalypse, and it showcases some variety in reactions.  But that’s where my praise ends.  The show rightly took some early heat for disproportionately zombifying people of color, but I actually think the bigger problem might be that it’s zombifying anyone at all.  What we want is a story about people in a background of threat; what we’re getting, so far, is too much of a story about the threat itself.  So we’re not getting enough of people actually communicating with each other—in other words, the stuff that would make the show interesting.  (We are getting a whole lot of “why don’t they just talk with each other,” though.)

Even worse, it’s hard to work up the energy to care about these particular people, who are so clearly doomed:  the best case scenario is that they survive the disintegration of society, only to live the rest of their lives in the world of The Walking Dead.  In principle, I think it’s to make an interesting show about people making do after a disaster, trying to recover from a disaster, or trying to defeat disaster, than it is to make a show where we know there’s little hope for our protagonists.  Sure, there are great survival stories of ordinary people overcoming the worst, but this one, at least, too often feels like watching people slide downhill into a pit.  Mind you, I get why the “ordinary person” tale is interesting.  Not everyone is a hero; the vast majority of people are just trying to make it, and heroes are few and far between.  I have no objection to shows about everyday people—but to be interesting, the everyday people have to rise to whatever their everyday occasions demand.  And after three episodes, I’m starting to see the human strengths and weaknesses of these everyday people, but I don’t really like or care about them yet. 

Verdict:  I think I’m going to wander away from this one, too.

 

On the DVR/Unreviewed:  Fall shows already!  The Bastard Executioner, Minority Report, Blindspot, and more coming hot on their heels.

Oh, the Humanity

Warning:  this is a really long update with a lot of reviews below – mostly because I’ve been gradually accumulating reviews that didn’t necessarily think fit together that well.  But as I ruminate on them now, most of them relate in some way to what it means to be human—to care, perhaps too much, to be afraid, to be guided by emotion or irrationality—and how that defines us.

When I think about defining “humanity,” a few things come to mind, aside of course from the zoological definition.  What does it mean when we say someone is particularly “human?”  Human means we make mistakes; we care about and respect other living things; and we have an internal emotional life.  So these traits separate us from animals and machines.  So it’s fascinating that they are all, in so many contexts, associated critically as feminine weaknesses.  Women make errors in judgment, presumably led astray by irrational emotionality.  Women care too much.  Women overthink rather than just doing . . .except of course when they’re doing rash and emotional things because they care too much.  Somehow these traits are good when ascribed to “humanity” and bad when ascribed to “femininity.” 

These assumptions is that they carry with them not only a very backhanded compliment, but also a sort of inevitability:  that men simply can’t help being inhuman.  Even if they want to feel and care and make mistakes, they just can’t help being callous and perfect.  Whereas for women, these “human” traits are also supposed to come naturally:  women are naturally nurturing, considerate, emotional, mistake-makers.  Wiser commentators than I have already observed one way in which this presumed superiority becomes problematic—women aren’t given credit for the difficulty of emotional labor; and men are praised for undertaking the smallest increments of it. 

But there’s something else odd about this, and it has to do with the way humans see the presence of humanity in non-humans.  Whether it’s connected with a larger point about femininity, we’re suspicious of emotions as motivations, see them as erratic and dangerous and frightening.  So machines and aliens and animals (and women, and minorities, and young people,) that have these things are suspect and scary, and that he world would be better, safer, more predictable, more productive if the establishment (read: white men, I guess) could control these things, in themselves and others.  These threads:  of emotion as suspect, and of male control over emotion as beneficial, run through all of these stories in one way or another.   Moral:  It’s good to be a man, I guess. 

                                                                                                                                                         

Humans (AMC, new.  (BBC/AMC Co-Prod.) Science Fiction Drama)

Watched: whole season

Premise:  What happens when a few very special androids have real emotions, hopes, and dreams?

Promise:  Set in a near-future where technology is largely in its current state but human-like but emotionless androids serve as domestic and industrial workers,  this story is a classic “change one thing” science fiction concept that’s beautifully executed. These are the stories of individuals, not humanity as a whole, and it feels both personal and global for that reason.  It focuses on very human reactions—the complicated emotional impact for everyone, special androids included, of trying to hide your true nature.   It says profound things about humans’ desire and ability to connect with others; humans’ often-selfish and suspicious impulses; humans’ warring natures of greed and compassion; the ability to love, feel, forget; the relationship between love and jealousy; the relationship between dignity and free will.  It is, perhaps, telling that I was suspicious of this show when it began—I thought it was another in a long line of banal explorations of “progress” and the question of whether robots can develop emotion—but I very quickly realized that it was doing something subtler than that:  assuming they can, and then exploring what it means when they do.  

Verdict:  Definitely worth watching.  I’m looking forward to the second season, which has already been ordered but will be quite some time in coming.

Zoo (CBS, new.  Thriller. (Interactive Television))

Watched:  several episodes

Premise:  What happens when animals stop being nice and start being real?

Promise:  This is a deeply, deeply silly show.  (Adapted from the James Patterson book of the same name.)  Like "Humans," it's a classic “change one thing” science fiction concept, but unlike "Humans," it's very hazily conceived and shakily executed.  Animals around the world have started attacking humans in a highly intelligent, organized fashion. The characters keep saying that the animals have become “not scared.”  But they seem to be using “not scared” to mean “intelligent, aggressive, organized and psychic.”   (To quote a genius:  “I do not think that word means what you think it means.”)  The human characters, on the other hand, are disorganized, frightened, poor communicators, and (frequently) unintelligent, which makes one wonder why we’re not supposed to be rooting for the animals here.  The show is predictable yet nonsensical, full of moments that I’m sure they thought were “cool” but just make the characters seem inept.  The characters are:  a white safari guide with a silly name (“Jackson Oz”) whose father was a crackpot but still probably prescient; a mystical black man; a plucky girl journalist with a largely unsubstantiated but probably still true obsession about an evil corporation; a french spy who seems singularly bad at spying; and an “animal pathologist” who doesn’t care for people and for that reason is the most likeable of the bunch.  I promise you I’m not exaggerating.

Verdict:  There are enough “interactive television” moments to make me watch in that spirit every once in a while, but seriously, I’m rooting for the animals. 

Scream (MTV, new.  Thriller)

Watched:  whole season

Premise:  Scream the movie, but a TV series.  AKA, self-aware Harper’s Island with teens.

Promise:  Scream did something revolutionary for the slasher genre:  it made it self-aware. When the horror victims know what kind of movie they’re in, it changes the whole scenario, giving it intelligence and lending the appeal of a mystery or an adventure rather than just the tension of survival.  This show does exactly the same thing, taking the Harper’s Island-style one-by-one killer-thriller and making it more self-aware and deftly moving it into the Internet age.  I loved every bit of it.  It wasn’t perfect, by any stretch:  it was still unnecessarily predictable in many of the places I wanted to be surprised (I’ll say no more to avoid spoilers); it doesn’t live up to the sort of emotional connection it aspires to by name-checking Friday Night Lights; it’s disappointingly short on racial diversity; and it’s just as sex-negative as its forebears.  But although each of those things is disappointing, none is surprising.  This is exactly the show it sets out to be.  

Verdict:  Well done.

Astronaut Wives Club (ABC, new.  Historical drama.)

Watched:  Pilot

Premise:  The story of the wives of the Mercury-mission astronauts.  Based on the book of the same name.

Promise:  Sigh.  I wanted to like this—a series about women living in extraordinary circumstances, maintaining their humanity while having to live lives larger than life, being great in human ways.  Or at least that’s what I hoped it would be.  I haven’t read the book, so I can’t tell how closely it hews to its source material, but I’m not sure that matters.  What it turns out to be is a sort of “Real Housewives of Cape Canaveral,” pitting the women against each other, making them catty and petty and defined by their men, querulous and often irrational.  The life of a test-pilot’s spouse was (and is), no doubt an extremely tense one, full of a combination of uncertainty and pride.  That comes through.  But a show about back-biting women and the“honey, don’t go” trope leans too heavily on stereotypes to feel true.  I love that the women are flawed and that their relationships don’t have the cookie-cutter perfection they were supposed to.  But even so, the story just isn’t compelling, because as imperfect as these women are, they feel more like stereotypes than people.   They don’t seem to have real feelings, and they don’t seem to have chemistry with each other.  To the extent there’s any chemistry at all, it’s between one of the wives and one of the reporters.  So even in a story about women’s relationships with each other, the most interesting relationship is with a man.  Double sigh.

Verdict:  The story of the astronauts is, no doubt, compelling. The story of the women as people would probably be compelling.  But the story of the women as defined by their men isn’t.

Startup U (ABC Family, new.  Reality/Competition).

Watched: pilot

Premise:  Young entrepreneurs compete for funding at a “university” designed to train them for the shark-pit world of startups.

Promise:  I watched this under the misapprehension that it was fiction, but it’s so artificial that it could be.  It’s basically the Apprentice for young entrepreneurs, and there’s an element of privilege, humiliation, and control—that the contestants need to be “broken” by the rich man before they can beg him for money—that made the show very hard for me to watch. I don’t doubt that the training they’ll get is tremendously useful, especially for the more naiive or inexperienced newcomers who will definitely need to learn how to impress venture capitalists.  But I don’t have to like it.   The show never lets us forget that the sponsor is an eccentric billionaire, and it never lets us forget the organizers expect to control every aspect of the students’ lives.  The students, for their part, seem self-absorbed and grasping, which lets the show highlight their backbiting and missteps.  This is a show where one expects to hear the classic “I’m not here to make friends,” and I for one wish they were.  

Verdict:  There’s a lesson here, about how much rich people expect to (and ultimately do) control the needy, and how desperation makes fools of us all, but it isn’t a lesson I want to watch.

Mr Robot (USA, new. Drama.)

Watched: first 4 episodes

Premise: Delusional IT security consultant becomes enmeshed in global hacking conspiracy.

Promise:  The show is angry, internal, and trippy, with an unreliable narrator.  It’s hard to pull off unreliable narrator on screen (because it’s hard to make our eyes lie to us), but when it’s done well, it can be amazing.  Is it amazing here?  Hard to say.  For the moment, the story isn’t what’s pulling me along, partly because it’s very difficult to get attached to the characters.  The only well-developed character is the narrator, because so much of the story is taking place in his head.  And he’s not particularly likeable.  It’s hard to get attached to the other characters, who also aren’t that likeable (some quirky for quirky’s sake, some cowardly, some just weird), and for all we know, they may be delusions.  So what’s pulling me along?  Playing a game of “what’s real,” trying to figure out what’s really happening in the world vs. what’s happening in his head.  And that’s a game that can get really old, because “interesting” isn’t the same thing as “compelling.”  At its best moments, the show reminds me of the allegorical fury and uncertainty of Fight Club (which is high on my list of favorites).  At its other moments, the very same storytelling tricks seem sort of boring and solipsistic.  I can’t help but think that this is the story of how a villain becomes radicalized, told from the villain’s perspective, which is certainly fresh, but it’s not entirely comfortable.  Whether I want to stay in that uncomfortable place is going to depend entirely on whether the characters and their story the story become compelling.

Verdict:  Jury’s still out, but the deliberations are at least kind of interesting.

On the DVR/Unreviewed:  Fear the Walking Dead, Public Morals, and Fall seasons starting soon! Eek!