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.