thepopculturelife

As a self-professed slave to the box, there are legitimate moments when I just have to stop and say to myself “God I love Television”. But when it comes right down to it, God has nothing to do with it; the only decent thing he’s ever had a producing credit on was Saving Grace and even he didn’t have enough star power to keep it on the air. No, the people who are truly responsible for my cries to the heaven are crazy geniuses like Joss Whedon, Aaron Sorkin, Ryan Murphy, Alan Ball, Josh Schwartz, and surprisingly to no one more than myself, and as I found out in this weeks lecture (Morris 2013); Matthew Weiner, creator of AMCs period drama Mad Men.

When I first sat down to watch Mad Men I didn’t really ‘get it’. I could see what it was doing and I could respect it but I just wasn’t the biggest fan. To date I’ve waded through the first three seasons, still waiting for that moment to get me hooked. It was an absolute shock to me then that it seemed I must have been texting when that moment happened. Because it happened in the shows very first episode. Check out the moment (also cited in Morris 2013) I’m talking about below:

Even if you’ve never seen the show, this moment is truly and utterly beguiling. This is the moment that had me stop and say “God I love television” and I can’t believe I didn’t see it before. The reason why I never fell in love with the show was because it always stressed the episode more than the season. There were arcs to keep me intrigued but nothing that said “you must watch next week or you will hate yourself”. But what happened here was a moment outside of complex narrative and series-long arcs. This was a moment that needed no introduction and still had me stop and say “God that was awesome”. I consider the show to be the storytelling cousin to fellow AMC drama Breaking Bad, which just completed what I believe to be a perfect run. This is a show that’s very premise was to detail the transformation of Mr. Chips into Scarface. A five-season epic that chronicled one mans journey from one thing to another. Bad never stressed the episode, it was always looking at the bigger picture, and this is something that I don’t think has ever been done quite as well, or will be for quite some time. Men on the other hand, and I get this more than ever now, is the gold standard for episodic narratives. Where Bad was reinventing what television could set out to do, Men has seemingly reinvented what its capable of in its purest form.

But ultimately, when there are so many examples of what we can deem great television, and mode of storytelling isn’t what makes them so special, just what is it that separates them from the pack? When we talk about the shows that paved the way for more complex dramas to appear on our screens, it almost always comes back to David Chases’ The Sopranos (which Weiner served on as an Executive Producer and wrote many episodes for). But just how did the poster-show for the mantra “Its Not TV. Its HBO” lead to a revolution across not just premium cable, but also basic cable and primetime network TV? Well, it’s all about the characters. If we forget about the distinction between long-form complex narrative and isolated episodic stories, there’s only got to be one great thing to get us to tune in. And that’s our favorite hero’s, anti-heroes… and yes, even villains showing up every week to do the thing we love to watch ‘em do. Tony Soprano led to Vic Mackey. Vic Mackey led to Jack Bauer. Jack Bauer to Walter White. And Walter White, well, he… I’m sorry, it’s still too soon.

I absolutely feel that I’ve been misjudging Mad Men all these years and I’m truly sorry about not giving it a fighting chance. The show it seems, like Don Draper himself is described, “isn’t what he seems under that polished surface. He’s as flawed and complicated and fascinating as any other great character of this period and he… masterfully explores the difference between perception and reality” (Sepinwall 2012, pp.301-302)

I believe Vic Mackey, corrupt and immoral anti-hero of FX’s The Shield says it best here…

… And I’ve gotta say, I don’t miss them at all.

References:

lucidmedia1, 2010, Don Draper’s best quote, Online Video, 10 November, Available from:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjg5TuXV09U, Accessed: 23 October 2013

Morris, B 2013, Week 9 – The Dispersal of Complex Narrative, PowerPoint Slides, RMIT University, Melbourne

Sepinwall, A 2012, The Revolution was Televised: The Cops, Crooks, Slingers and Slayers that changed TV drama forever, Kindle Edition, Self-published, eBook

xbfir3x, 2010, A Different Kind of Cop, Online Video, 01 December. Available from:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ixeh-uf9KQw, Accessed: 23 October 2013

Ok, I have a confession to make. I did not enjoy Treme. In fact I hated it. And no it wasn’t just because I had no idea what was going on the entire time… Alright, it was mostly because I had no idea what was going on the entire time; I was frustrated, I was bored, and I was angry at myself for being frustrated and bored. So the question I ask is, was it my fault? Or show creator David Simons?

Long-form narrative in television is probably the best thing to ever happen to the small screen since Betty White (how awesome is Betty White!?). But omigod is it a dangerous game to be playing. I don’t watch television conventionally. Most of the time I’ll sit down to a new show after impulsively buying the box-set and I’ll scrutinize it from the ground up. I’ll remember every plotline, I’ll dissect every episode and I’ll follow the arc to its completion. So a show that has a good story to sink my teeth into is something I’m always up for. But for the majority of people out there, when NCIS is the most watched show in America, a long complex plot isn’t always what the doctor ordered (my doctor loves The Mentalist). And what I experienced in this weeks screening of “I’ll Fly Away” Treme’s season one finale (cited in Morris 2013), is something I believe most people would also experience as a first time viewer. But it was still something I didn’t really anticipate. I really really hated Treme. And this is something that poses an interesting dilemma. Is a show defined by its series long arc? Or should it be judged at face value after one episode?

Drawing comparison to Simons’ other work The Wire, something that I have seen, it’s fair to say that he doesn’t pander. Without even a ‘previously on’ bit to catch us up, it’s clear that he’s not making these shows to satisfy a ratings mandate, he’s simply telling us a story that’s best watched from the beginning – and you better pay attention. As a result, people don’t talk about these shows as something they tuned into for half an hour and so became hooked. No, these are the shows that when people discover them, they will say “I am ready to watch The Wire” and thus commit to forsaking the real-world for the closest thing to a novel you’ll ever see committed to film. But does it really work as television? As something built to be consumed in 60-minute chunks? TV critic Alan Sepinwall, on the open-ended and unconventional nature of the pilot writes, “television in 2002 simply didn’t work this way – even the ambitious HBO kind of television… [Oz and The Sopranos] at least gave you a clear sense of the major players, and they provided some stories that had a beginning, middle, and end within the confines of that hour” (2012, pp.70-71). And I have to agree that there’s a fine line between a well-executed narrative, and a self-important writer who doesn’t respect the medium he’s in.

Because ultimately, television isn’t pitched to be a cult hit on DVD (sorry Firefly), it’s pitched to be able to invite new viewers and enthrall existing ones week-to-week and episode-to-episode. And this is where I find a big problem with Treme. I could care less what happens to these people. I don’t know where they’re coming from and I don’t feel the need to know where they’re going. Is it my job to care though? Or Simons job to make me care? Personally, and this is grand-sweeping statement time, I think that there should be something in every episode of every show that prompts a first time viewer to jump in. I don’t mean that a show should give up its message to satisfy newcomers, but that a shows creator can look at any episode and point to a moment and say “that’s it, that’s why you should watch”. But unfortunately, neither The Wire nor Treme apparently, manages to accomplish this in every hour they serve up.

Regardless of where I think they can try harder though, both The Wire and Treme do attempt something that I wholeheartedly support. I’m a big fan of the slow burn and look no further than Breaking Bad for a great example of when a show can be all the hotter for it. But I truly believe that David Simons needs to be sat down and told what is acceptable and not acceptable for a television series. And for me to be left wondering why I wasted an hour of my life, with the realisation that I clearly just skipped to the last chapter in a book. Well that’s not the point of TV, and I don’t see the point in pandering to a TV series that won’t acknowledge that long-form narrative is a two way street… And that most people are taking the bus.

Reference:

Morris, B 2013, Week 8 – The Poetics of Complex Narrative, PowerPoint Slides, RMIT University, Melbourne

Sepinwall, A 2012, The Revolution was Televised: The Cops, Crooks, Slingers and Slayers that changed TV drama forever, Kindle Edition, Self-published, eBook

Walter White. Don Draper. Tony Soprano. Nate Fisher. Vic Mackey. Christian Troy. Dexter Morgan. Carrie Bradshaw. Hannah Horvath. All uncompromising examples of what quality television has given us over the past decade…
What? What’s wrong?…
What did I say?…
Oh I used that word didn’t I?

Quality. It’s a funny little word. In any other discussion we would use it to describe something as being better. In television we use it to describe a genre. And if we hadn’t had cable networks start branding themselves with this term, it might still actually mean something. On July 12th 1997, HBO was the first to kick off a new era of scripted television, for this was the day it debuted Oz. Chris Albrecht, the then president of HBO original programming said that “It was the first thing we had seen for premium television that was a true dramatic series… it was startling how much different it felt from anything else on television” (cited in Sepinwall 2012, pp.271). The word he was looking for to describe it? You guessed it ladies and gentleman, it’s ‘quality’. However, while I don’t dispute the awesomeness that is Oz, as HBO went onto forge a name for themselves as the leader of the quality pack with shows like Six Feet Under and The Sopranos, they also started a dangerous precedent. This being that while all these shows had very little in common with regards to the stories they told, they were all being labeled as the same thing. As more and more series’ started popping up like The Shield and Nip/Tuck, we were again told that this was ‘quality’ because it was something that we hadn’t had before. But now that we can stack them up against each other and ask which one was better. Which of the quality’s is of better quality? We kind of have to admit that we’ve made a horrible mistake.

People who watched HBO ten years ago were watching for series’ like Oz, Six Feet Under and The Sopranos. Television that truly raised the bar for the kind of ‘quality’ stories we could see on our little black box. These were shows that had stories to tell and were allowed to do it because they didn’t have advertisers to worry about offending, and the sex and the violence was part of the package, not the premise. However, people watching HBO now are watching it for shows like True Blood, Game of Thrones and Girls. I’m not hating on this new generation, I do honestly believe that Hannah Horvath has more interesting things to say than Carrie Bradshaw, but the term quality, now synonymous with anything HBO puts out, has also become synonymous with the sex, violence and nudity that it allows. Does a nipslip mean better production values? Does a sword to the neck mean better writing? And does a close up of an “O” face mean better directing? These should be the deciding factors of quality, and not how many breasts we can fit into half an hour (sorry, Lena).

Unfortunately, it’s probably too late to take back the night and give quality its dignity back. And to even have a fair discussion about it would be unlikely because let’s face it, a discussion of quality when talking about television series is rarely a discussion among equals…

In fact, it’s usually a discussion between two high horses… that are facing opposite directions… and from different countries… oh and look, one of them just shot themselves in the foot.

References:

Sepinwall, A 2012, The Revolution was Televised: The Cops, Crooks, Slingers and Slayers that changed TV drama forever, Kindle Edition, Self-published, eBook