What makes a show boring?

Dedicated readers will know that I often love bad TV.  But I need to back up and define terms.  There are a lot of kinds of “bad.”  The kind of “bad” that I often like involves high concepts that don’t make sense, silly plots that don’t hold together, arcs that fly off into psychedelic fancy, or characters that make inexplicable decisions.  Those are the sorts of things exempt a show from being “good,” but not from being “awesome,” or some other measure of entertainingness.  I can still care about these shows, or at least find them entertaining, even though they’re bad by some objective measures.

My friend Jearl invented the theory of the “Totally Subjective Biaxial Entertainingness Scatterplot,” which postulates that every movie (and I’d add, television show) can be mapped on to a graph with an X axis that measures “good/bad” and a Y axis that measures “awesome/lame.”  (As an aside, I wish I could come up with a word that encapsulated the full concept of “opposite of awesome” without the unintentionally ableist implications of the word “lame,” but I’m at a loss for one that fits that bill well, to my regret.)  The genius of the scatterplot is that it recognizes that “good” is but one of many possible measures of enjoyability.  I am eternally grateful to Jearl for inventing the scatterplot, not only because it accompanies the deeply entertaining “mystery arranger” series of movie reviews, but even more because it changed how I think about entertainment assessment. 

There are of course other possible axes one could add to a scatterplot-type assessment system if one wished to complicate it yet further.  Expensive/cheap.  Realistic/Fanciful.  But for sheer measures of entertainingness, these seem unnecessary.  Lately, though, I’ve been wondering about “fascinating/boring.”  At first, I thought it might be the same thing as “awesome/lame,” but then I thought about some things that, by my own subjective measures, are awesome yet boring (e.g., an hour of nothing but explosions) or lame yet fascinating (e.g., Koyaanisqatsi).

I’m dwelling on this because it intersects with my concept of “interactive television.”  Interactive television is often bad/awesome, or at least bad/fascinating.  It has to be bad enough to merit yelling at the screen, but interesting enough that you care enough to want to yell at the screen.  Boring TV won’t reward watching enough to make interactivity worthwhile. 

But what makes a show boring? I haven’t put my finger on that yet.  It has something to do with predictability.  Surprising shows are more interesting than predictable ones.  But sometimes unpredictable shows are boring because the unpredictable elements seem random rather than intriguing, and sometimes predictable shows, especially procedurals, are nonetheless interesting.  Likewise, boringness definitely has something to do with having characters I don’t care about, but I’m still not sure what makes me care (or not) about a character.  Clearly a character has to have identifiable wants and needs for me to care about them, but there are characters with wants and needs who I care about, and characters (albeit fewer) with obscure wants and needs that I may find intriguing.   

Which leaves me with a big “I don’t know.”  But here is the little group of shows that made me ask this question in the first place.  All three are based on existing works (a movie, a comic, and a book, respectively), but I think that’s coincidence.

Damien (A&E, new.  Supernatural drama.)

Watched:  first three episodes

Premise:  The guy who played Arthur in Merlin plays Damien Thorn, a photojournalist who discovers he’s the antichrist.  Based on The Omen.

Promise:   The concept has enormous potential.  Watching someone resist their presumed-inevitable fate can make for fascinating stories, and I enjoyed Bradley James in both Merlin and iZombie.  I envisioned something pulpy and cool.  But the show has embraced a humorless tone bordering on self-importance.  The tone invited mockery, though, and for the first episode and a half I found the show to be amazing, in an “is this really happening?” sort of way.  I thought it could be the next Zero Hour.  I narrated its hilarious illogic to my friends over e-mail.  I marveled at its ability to kill people off by mud drowning and dog mauling and incorporate lines like “Yeah, you never told me how your taxi accident connects with this dog mauling” with a totally straight face.  But somewhere in the third episode I just started getting bored. 

Verdict:  This is a show that rewards close watching with marvelous nonsense, but that takes a lot of energy and doesn’t feel worth it.

Wynnona Earp (SyFy, new.  Action/western/horror.)

Watched:  first two episodes

Premise:  A young woman returns to a small Western town to confront her family’s literal demons.

Promise: This is based on the Image/IDW comic of the same name, and it falls prey to some of the common adaptation issues—it feels like there’s lots of information we should know, but don’t.   The question is whether we care.  The show’s hillbilly setting and fanservicey aesthetic maintain some of the same Exploitation style of the comic. But it’s hard to maintain the winking humor of exploitation without becoming either self-serious or crass, and this show does a little of each.   I don’t think the problem is with the concept.  This show could, with the right execution, been a sort of redneck Buffy.  But it feels clunky, partly in its exposition and dialog and partly in its performances.  It felt like all the characters were performing themselves, rather than being themselves. 

Verdict:  I may try it again later in the season to see if it found its humor groove, but for now I’m out.

Hunters (SyFy, new.  Horror.)

Watched:  first two episodes

Premise:  FBI team hunts aliens who live among us.

Promise:  This is based on Whitley Streiber’s Alien Hunter, and it’s standard alien-invasion fare.  I was drawn to certain elements of the concept, particularly the idea of aliens with unusual acoustical abilities and a prominent hearing-impaired character.  In fact, there are a few disability issues scattered throughout the show that I was ready to find interesting.  But then the hearing-impaired character was fridged to motivate the lead male, and it went downhill from there.  In fact, there’s a weird pattern of women’s disabilities motivating men in this show.  I’m predisposed to like Natalie Chaidez’ work and I do find one character intriguing—the alien who’s decided to help the human investigators—but I don’t think either of those things is strong enough to keep me watching something that otherwise feels so generic.

Verdict: I’ll probably give it another episode but I’m not optimistic.

On the DVR/Unreviewed:  I’m not quite keeping up, as the unreviewed total seems to have risen from 22  to 23.  But I see a little bit of catching up-time in my future.

Women in Medicine

It’s always seemed odd to me that even though society stereotypes women as caregivers, it doesn’t expect them to be doctors.  I understand why hegemonic expectations have historically relegated women to profesional “helper” roles (nurse, not doctor; paralegal, not lawyer; etc.) but in the medical profession, that’s had the odd effect of assigning the “caregiving” part of medicine to nurses and the “elite excellence” part to men.  One thing that’s cool about Code Black is that it turns those gender expectations on their heads, or at least complicates them.

We’ve had a couple of shows in the Winter/Spring focused on women in medicine.  They’re dramas, not procedurals, so it’s not surprising that they’re more about the lead characters’ emotional lives than about their medical skills.  It is interesting, though, that each features women wrangling against other women for decision-making power.  Perhaps even more interesting is that each presents its lead woman as highly intelligent and strong-willed, but prone to sentimentality.  Their good decisions are guided by their heads, but their bad decisions are driven by their hearts. 

On one hand, these things bug me.  On the other hand, both shows give us interesting portrayals of strong female characters, and a variety of them, with different strengths and weaknesses.   So I want to love these shows.  And I’ve enjoyed some things about each of them—Mercy Street more than Heartbeat—but not loved them.  Each falls just short of what I’d hoped for. 

Heartbeat (NBC, new.  Medical drama)

Watched: first three episodes

Premise:  Rulebreaking surgeon is very good at her job but very bad at her personal life

Promise:  The premise (“woman is good at her job but bad at her personal life”) has grown tiresome.  I think it jumped the shark somewhere around “Bad Judge.”  Anyway, this woman is basically the doctor version of Olivia Pope, a strong-willed risk-taker whose professional risks pay off better than her personal ones.  I am so SO tired of the woman who’s good at everything but gets all shudder-breathed when presented with their One True Love Who’s A Bad Idea.  It drove me away from Scandal and will drive me away from this show.  Were it not for that, she would be a complex, interesting character, with a lot of talent and a chip on her shoulder, who doesn’t understand the complexities of human interaction but has a lot of ingenuity and ability to connect.  And that seems like such an easy fix.  It wouldn’t be a panacea:  the show would still have problems.  Its heart is melodrama, and the actual superhero skill of the doctors is presumed and set aside to make room for personal-life drama.  It relies on hilariously outlandish medical problems. And its people of color are relegated to small novelty roles.  So I don’t know if I’d want to watch it regularly.  But at least I’d care a lot more about its main character.

Verdict:  I’m disappointed.

Mercy Street (PBS, new.  Period medical drama.)

Watched: Season 1

Premise:  A nurse works at a hospital during the Civil War, treating mostly Union soldiers and confronting the changing times.

Promise:  This show has a large ensemble cast of characters from Union and Confederacy, from different classes, races, and backgrounds.  Which means there’s a lot of potential here for stories about tough, high-drama choices.  This is a time of war, and the characters clash over the personal and philosophical:  whether and how to have compassion for their wartime enemies, how the races interact in a world where slavery is at the forefront of contemporaneous war--but neither as much as I’d like.  The show is at its best when confronting the tough stuff, and it does so sometimes. But most of the time, the tough stuff is a backdrop to much more ordinary power schemes and romances, so the show has blunter edges than I’d like.    

Verdict:  I liked it enough to watch the whole season over the course of a couple of days and to be glad it's renewed, but I still think it didn't live up to its potential.

On the DVR/Unreviewed:  Holding steady at 22 shows.  So…I guess I’m keeping up? 

Women are Desperate

I’m not sure why it’s taken me so much time to work up the energy to write this one, but I first started mulling it somewhere in the midst of the Fall 2015 shows.  It hasn’t improved since then: as it's been marinating in my mind, the shows typifying it have been piling up.  There are really quite a few of them, now. 

I’m struck by how frequently prominent female character seemed to be driven by a sense of desperation, and how in contrast, prominent male characters seemed to be driven by something different.  A sense of honor, or pride, or greed, or loyalty, or the like.  Women’s needs are unbounded, unpredictable.  Men’s needs are more measured, less wild.  I don’t mean to say that this applies to every character.  Not all female characters are desperate; some male characters are.  But on average, it seems to me that TV women are more likely than TV men to be cornered into a no-win situation or driven to the edge of a moral precipice by utter desperation for whatever makes them feel secure.  Desperation to be popular.  Desperation for the well-being of their children.  Desperation for male attention.  [add others]. 

Who cares?  Desperation makes for good drama.  But what bothers me about this is the subtle underlying implication that women’s moral compasses are more flexible, more susceptible to risk-induced alteration.  Or that women are just needier.  This has been a prevailing narrative for eons—that men can take care of themselves (although they may need to learn “how to be good” at formative moments from nurturing women), but that women need safety, care, and support, preferably from a man, at all stages of their lives, and they’ll do anything to get it.  This is at the root of the golddigger paradigm, the idea that men will seek out beauty/health in a woman while women will seek out safety/security in a man because of some sort of evolutionary imperative.  Of course this isn’t wholly unrealistic; it does sometimes play out in real life.  But as a storytelling pattern, it’s insidious.  This “will do anything to get it” desperation makes women inherently dangerous creatures, unworthy of trust.

The worst part is that I think in at least some of these situations, the creators think they’re making a “strong” woman—one who can fight any obstacle like a mama bear, or whose adrenaline makes her strong enough to lift a car to rescue a baby pinned underneath.  But this pattern doesn’t look strong to me, it looks unreliable.  That unreliability is, I think, at the root of a great deal of misogynistic assumptions.  If a man is bad, we know he’s bad.  If a woman is good…she may at any time turn bad out of sheer desperation. 

Maybe I’m taking this too far.  But the desperate woman thing is so common—and so different from what I’m seeing in men—that it’s at least worth noting.  Here are a few. (And I’m not even counting The Magicians, which I’ve already reviewed):

Scream Queens (Fox, Fall 2015.  Thriller.)

Watched:  First 2 or3 episodes

Premise:  A slasher stalks an intensely image-conscious sorority

Promise:  Most of the characters in this are all desperate for something—status, acceptance, popularity—and most of them are terrible specimens of humanity.  It’s all very stylized, and I get the sense that the show thinks it’s condemning these terrible people for their terribleness, and celebrating the show’s misfits as superior people (which they no doubt are).  But when push comes to shove, it embodies much of what it might be critiquing.  For example, the only joke about the hearing impaired character is that she can’t hear.  The joke about the militant lesbian is that she’s a militant lesbian.  The show is slightly kinder to its men, but only slightly so.  I could go on and on, but I decided to stop watching early enough that I don’t really know how bad it got, or how much it may have improved.

Verdict:  This has been renewed for Fall 2016, but if you want a slasher-thriller, I’d say watch Scream in the summer instead.

                                                           

Wicked City (ABC, Fall 2015.  Crime Drama.)

Watched: first 2 episodes

Premise:  Serial killer in 1980s Los Angeles.

Promise:  The underlying conceit here—that a charming serial killer is so charming that he not only charms women into being his victims, but also charms a woman into being his accomplice—is what got me thinking about this theme in the first place.  It’s a period piece, and maybe it’s supposed to be about a particular kind of Hollywood neediness at a particular time and place, but what I see at the heart of this show is a vast generalization about how desperately women want to be loved and accepted, and how vulnerable that makes them to being deceived.  Tell them what they want to hear, and they’ll go home with you.  Dedicate a song to them, and they’ll go down on you.  Tell them you have a “real connection” and they’ll murder for you.  Everything in this show relies on pulling the wool over women’s eyes. Even the detective is carrying on an extramarital affair with a hot colleague.

Verdict:  Yuck.

Flesh & Bone (Starz, Winter 2015-16 limited series.  Drama.)

Watched: First two episodes

Premise:  A brilliant ballet dancer finds her way in a big New York company.

Promise:  There are a lot of really cool and interesting things here.  Gorgeous dancing.  The looming threat of the main character’s difficult background.  The different ways in which the dancers find their individual strengths in a punishing world.  But this is indeed a punishing world, often gratuitously ugly, and the show doesn’t pull many punches.  That can make for great drama, but it can also be hard to watch.  And there are a few things running underneath the surface of this show that I find insidious, even as they may make for compelling stories.  First, our main character is a woman who’s attractive because she doubts herself.  (Ugh.)  Second, she’s very much at the mercy of her world.  Her strength comes when she’s cornered, desperate to survive, to retain her sense of self in the face of abuse.  This is an admirable kind of “strong,” but it’s a kind of strong we see too often, because it subtly perpetuates the idea that abuse is “good” for women because it makes women strong.  (That’s a whole ‘nother post, there.)  Finally, it embodies the trope that when you put a bunch of women together, they’ll snipe and compete with each other.  That’s baked into the ballet system, I gather, which makes this true to life, but it’s a story I’ve seen play out more often than I want.  

Verdict:  I would have kept watching, pushing through the tough parts, because there really was a lot of good there.  But I ran out of DVR space. 

Shades of Blue (NBC, new.  Crime drama.)

Watched:  Pilot

Premise:  A dirty cop is trapped into becoming an FBI informant.

Promise:  This series’ protagonists are police officers who abuse their authority by running protection scams, covering up murders, taking bribes, and generally considering themselves above the law.  The lead (played by Jennifer Lopez, in a convincing performance) is at least somewhat well-meaning, but her ethics are crap, driven by her desperation to “protect” and support her daughter.  And I think we’re supposed to like not only her, but also her fellow dirty cops, or at least we’re supposed to think there’s something admirable about them; in particular, I think we’re supposed to think that Lopez’s character has integrity because she resists becoming a “rat” on the rest of her dirty-cop crew.  And so maybe this is me, but even if there’s good drama, I just can’t abide this premise:  the idea that loyalty is more important than law, that corruption that “keeps the peace” can be good for the community—it’s fundamentally repugnant.  

Verdict: Nope                                                                                       

On the DVR/Unreviewed:  I’m catching up a tiny bit, I think, but I’m still too ashamed to list all 22 (?) shows.