Television – Brian Crick

Thoughts on Star Trek: Discovery

I like Star Trek: Discovery.

But… I don’t love it. I really want to love it.

As with many other pieces of entertainment I’ve consumed lately, it’s taking real work to engage with the show on its own terms. Specifically, I’m having trouble with the long-format storytelling. I want my TV episodes to end. That doesn’t mean I only want happy endings and simplistic morals and the bridge crew telling jokes before the credits roll. It means I want each episode to feel like a story, not a sequence of events with no beginning or end.

My wife and niece have been watching some of the early-ish seasons of Supernatural and I’m really impressed with how many of those episodes feel like self-contained monster-of-the-week stories with emotionally satisfying endings, and move the whole-season arc along.

But.. I don’t get the impression Discovery is going for that approach. Most episodes just feel like… chapters in a book.

Which is ok I suppose, if the season as a whole ends up being a satisfying story when viewed as a whole. I’ve never felt like a whole-season-story arc was any more satisfying or interesting than my favorite self-contained tv episodes (A Series of Unfortunate Events and the one season of American Horror Story came close)… but I’m willing to entertain the possibility that if any show is going to sell me on long-form storytelling, it’s going to be Star Trek.

Isolating Werewolves

My wife, brother and I have been watching both the UK and US versions of Being Human, shows about a vampire, a werewolf and a ghost sharing an apartment, just trying to lead normal lives. I love comparing the two shows, though I’m not interested so much in the US/UK cultural differences… and while it’s interesting that, stylistically, the two shows are very different, I’m not that interested in analyzing that, either.

Which I find fascinating about this is when the shows are almost exactly the same — but not quite.

For example, we recently watched episodes where, in both versions of the show:

Werewolf #1 befriends a fellow, more experienced Werewolf #2, who tries to teach him how to manage this whole werewolf thing.
Werewolf #1 is insulted by a Nurse in the hospital where he works.
Werewolves #1 and #2 go to a bar, and Werewolf #2 shows Werewolf #1 how he can use his magic powers of werewolfishness to get a date with the waitress.
Werewolf #1 bumps into Nurse again. She tries to apologize, and Werewolf #1 makes an embarrasingly awful attempt to seduce her, which completely fails.

There are some major changes in the feel of plot point #3 in the US and UK versions; the former has Werewolf #2 coming off totally creepy, and the latter’s werewolf comes off more believably attractive. But I was most intrigued by plot point #4.

The only real difference between versions is the presence of Werewolf #2 in the scene. In the UK version, he’s there with Werewolf #1 and Nurse, goading Werewolf #1 on through a seduction attempt that Werewolf #1 doesn’t really want to commit to. Werewolf #2 doesn’t say much at all; his mere presence is causing some peer pressure.

In the US version, Werewolf #2 isn’t in this scene at all. Werewolf #1 takes it upon himself to try out the magical seduction thing on Nurse, and it completely changes the dynamic of the scene. We see Werewolf #1’s actions as bad handling of his relationship with Nurse, instead of seeing it in terms of trying to impress his new werewolf mentor. We see how Werewolf #1 is already starting to internalize Werewolf #2’s teachings, instead of getting dragged through his education.

I like how in the US version, Werewolf #1 owns his own failure. I think it made his story more interesting.

It’s a small difference, but it changes a lot. And that’s why I like watching both versions of this show simultaneously. It’s like you’re getting to isolate your variables in a controlled experiment, and you’re going to learn the most from such experiments when the isolation is clean. It’s a great way to learn about writing.

Pan Am, Part 2: In Which I Argue with Myself

First, a picture:

Aren’t those engines lovely? So… retro and stuff in a way I didn’t expect actual jet engines to have ever been retro.

Anyway, on to more Pan Am. I came up with a counterargument to the bit in my last post comparing this to Mad Men, and thought I’d share.

I’m generally of the opinion that it’s the job of fiction to exaggerate the crap out of the protagonists’ struggles. I’m not a huge fan of naturalism. That’s part of why I like science fiction; I like how you can take mundane personal issues and explore them through made-up technologies and discoveries.

So if the mundane issue you want to explore is sexism in the modern, mundane world, it makes perfect sense to explore that in the 1960s, so you can make things a whole lot harder for your female characters.

Now, personally, I don’t like that approach; I want to see (and write) characters who have basically the same mindset and values as modern people; I find the characters in period dramas kind of alien sometimes. (That’s mostly why I preferred the Keira Knightley Pride & Prejudice to the BBC one; in the former, I felt like these were modern people with modern values, and I could easily empathize with their frustrations with this whole formalized approach to courtship.)

But anyway, that’s just a personal preference, and I’ll still accept the 1960s setting of Mad Men as a valid approach to heightening your drama and presenting the world with positive role models.

Of course, this is all dependent on the extent to which the show actually highlights the struggles of the women and the extent to which they either succeed outright or grow as characters through their struggles. I’m not through the first season yet, and so far, I’m not sure I’d say the women’s stories are the focus of the show. But my understanding is that that may change later on, so I’ll try to keep myself open to that and see what I think if the show goes that way.

Friendly Skies

So I wanted to talk about Pan Am a bit.

Pilots

I really like television pilots that don’t quite know what they’re doing. I like how eager they are, how they’re all like omg omg look at all these cool ideas we have! and yeah, some of those ideas aren’t real solid, but it’s hard not to get caught up in how excited the show is at merely existing.

Pan Am doesn’t quite seem sure what it is yet, and I’m ok with that. Not knowing exactly where this is going to go is part of what makes it fun.

Mad Men

It’s sort of impossible to talk about this without mentioning Mad Men.

I’ll start by saying that calling these shows competitors is kind of insulting to both. For better or worse, Pan Am isn’t Mad Men on a Plane, nor is it trying to be.

What I think is worth talking about, however, was the two shows’ different approaches to feminism. I could write pages and pages about this, but I guess the basic idea is, if your goal as a show with a feminist agenda is to make the world a more egalitarian place by having people watch you, I think Pan Am has the more viable approach.

The show itself is easy to get into. I was pretty much sold on the show before the first commercial break. It’s fun, it’s zippy, it’s visually stunning. Whatever it’s saying, I suspect it’s at least going to communicate it to a wide audience. Yes, I’ve started watching Mad Men, but in the sort of way you’ll choke down a new food for a while so you’ll eventually develop a taste for it. Mad Men is many things, but I wouldn’t call it approachable.

Perhaps more importantly, Pan Am is trying to present some positive, strong female role models. Sure, they’re not terribly three-dimensional, but the show makes it fairly explicit that this is what it’s trying to do. There’s even a scene in the end where a little girl is staring in awe of the female leads… it’s beautifully un-subtle.

I don’t care if having women this independent and men this ok with it isn’t historically accurate. If glossing over history is what it takes to get some strong female characters out there, than I’m all for it. To the extent that television shows are consumed within the real world; to the extent that many people will connect to television characters and stories as strongly as real people and real situations, the world is a more egalitarian place because this egalitarian fantasy world was created within it.

I prefer that to littering the airwaves with a bunch of sexist male characters with sexist male dialogue. If we took the characters in Mad Men and plopped them in a show set in an ad agency in the modern world with a sexist sort of work culture, would we complain that the writers and writing were sexist? Does it matter what time period it’s set in?

To me, it feels like sitting around complaining about the problem rather than actively solving it.

Eye Candy

Not that Pan Am is all that high-minded. (Though I don’t think you have to come off as high-minded if you want to effectively advance your cause, whatever it is.) I’m in it mostly for the style, not the substance. Things as mundane as airplane cabins are beautifully lit; I love the over-saturated colors and over-designed costumes; the shots are stylishly composed and edited. Sure, the dialogue wasn’t amazing, the plotting not terribly solid and I wouldn’t call the pilot a self-contained, satisfying story, but I think I’ll keep watching the show on style alone.

Who knows, maybe it will get deeper as time goes on, but I’d be sad if it got less happy.