A Long Post About Lost, Prestige TV, Comic Book Movies, and the Serialization of Everything

Lost

It's clear that my relationship to genre cultural properties has changed in the last ten years, and given enough time, it's clear that Lost is the reason for that change. I had a much larger appetite for them before, and almost none now. It's not entirely clear what exactly about Lost took me in that direction. But for need of a lot of something to watch, I've returned to it. I had a disparate reaction on this occasion to two of the most famous emotional beats in the story, and it might be worth exploring why. "Not Penny's Boat" had all of the resonance it did the first time. "The Constant" was a tremendous disappointment. This isn't surprising, since they were told in very different ways.

"Not Penny's Boat" is genuinely affecting because it builds over the course of several episodes before resolving. Desmond begins to get flashes that Charlie will die, and tries to save him; Desmond gets a particularly tempting vision and almost lets Charlie die. For his part, Charlie has to come to accept that his death is going to come soon and there's nothing he can do about it. The emotional punch comes because he gets to pick the cause for which he dies: he's found something worthy of that kind of sacrifice. Making that resolution changes him, frees him, to become someone who can be bold and active and self-sacrificing. He is free because there's meaning in his death. That allows him to be calm enough to save Desmond and communicate the important message that only he knows and then die.

"The Constant" is not genuinely affecting because it contrives its own problem and provides too pat of a solution. The "problems crossing between times" bit is introduced no earlier than the very end of the previous episode, and does not reappear again for another whole season (where it claims one single victim, conveniently not a major character). The life-threatening problem is given to two characters, one of whom only exists in order to pass along crucial exposition about the threat and how to get around it, and the problem for the main character is completely resolved by the end of the episode. This serious problem also, surprisingly, affected no one else involved in any travel to or from the island, and none of the numerous people shuttling back and forth between the freighter and the island for the rest of the season. The episode exists only for its endpoint--Penny and Desmond getting in contact with one another--and the rest is simply a means of getting the viewer there. It's emotional manipulation rather than storytelling, gesturing at rather than being something great.

The difference is that one of these is a storyline for a character's arc in a narrative, and another is a cool episode.

The difference between these matters because their reception says something about how we understand stories at this moment. Big cultural properties are (again) serialized: movies, books, tv shows are often now guaranteed out a certain distance into the future; like previous serials, they encourage looking at individual parts closely and wholes very rarely, and then only from certain narrow perspectives: we ask what the stakes are, whether the stories are internally consistent, whether they are, in each piece, entertaining. As a whole we might ask whether the story is worth the time invested, but these are judgments of the whole, rather than "we might omit 40 minutes/three episodes/200 pages without great loss" because the economics inform the structure of the content, rather than the content dictating anything at all. No one complains very much about mid-season episodes of a tv show that spin their wheels, because, as goes the usual critic's line, these come up of necessity in every season: even if there are only six episodes of plot, there need to be 13, or 22, or 24 episodes, so something has to fill that time. That you probably need to have seen all the other Marvel movies to understand the new ones is considered a feature, rather than a bug, and anyway, that's just how they make movies now.

When I was much younger I remember watching a few soap operas (hey, they were new tv in the summer, back when that was unusual), and particularly General Hospital when Luke and Laura were first re-introduced. Luke had been a bad guy at first, but now he was a good guy, because the show needed him to be one. The catch with a soap opera is that none of the stories can ever end, because the show must go on five days a week, and should ideally involve the same popular characters or actors. Consequently narrative logic must go out the window--filling out the time is the only thing that really matters--with characters changing allegiance and motivation all the time, and all the loopy narrative flourishes one associates with soap opera as a form.

Regular tv shows, movies, and multi-part books, lacking plot to fill out the allotted time and space, now indulge generously in melodrama and soap-opera antics (*paging George R.R. Martin*). Lost would disappear as a show if people answered each others' questions and didn't just go hiking off into the jungle every time they thought about doing something: the story needs these distractions as it needs the various other fancy-looking macguffins because the story can't hold out on its own. (As an experiment: try to summarize season 5 of Lost in one sentence. It is either impossible to do, if you try to include any of the details, or quite easy--"Ben tricks everyone into coming back to the Island, except in 1974"--which only exposes how superfluous much of it is.) Everything else is plot machinations for their own sake: Daniel and Charlotte get a romantic attachment which is entirely told and never shown, because Daniel needs some stakes for his own arc and the love of his life being threatened can provide them. Don Draper cycles through alcoholism and various women either because that's what he does or because it provides a few episodes of him looking seductive and cool and then a chance to blow it all up at the end, which will happen every season at fixed times that just so happen to coincide with the major parts of the season. (Friends, by contrast, didn't bother to get Ross and Rachel together, or break them up, at any significant moment in seasons 2 and 3 (February Sweeps, probably, but at least not as predictable). Then again, when you're a cultural phenomenon, you can do whatever you want and be certain you'll get a rating. That the MCU movies don't attempt this is probably also notable.) Loki gets himself captured in The Avengers, and it hardly matters whether his plan makes sense because it provides for Character Exposition and A Chance To Heighten The Themes Of This Movie. When movies, books, tv, engage in these kinds of stalling tactics, they kill actual organic character growth, but do so simply because the economics of the situation demand it. The skeleton shows in so many places now. One only has to look for it.

The flip-side of the soap opera-ization of things is that individual moments mean a lot less. No one soap character's great scene or arc means a lot when it's stacked up against others of wildly varying quality and changing motivation. Wasn't that time Don stopped drinking and recognized his problems really inspiring? Does "The Suitcase" mean less as an episode now that you know absolutely nothing about Don changed as a result of it? "The Constant" is a great episode if you have no idea what's going to happen to Desmond. Once you know it only serves to torture him with a bit of happiness before his life is ruined, how does it seem?

The single biggest factor contributing to the Golden Age of TV is the fact that no one can conceptualize of a creative model that works differently than this ("tell a fixed-length story until it's done and then end it?"). It used to be only comic book nerds that were suckers like this: the "even numbers are good" joke about Star Trek movies is an admission that 50% of them are bad; the hype for the new Star Wars movie seems to have forgotten that four of the six were disappointments. Now people are prepared to hold out hope for years and against all evidence that the results will be worth it, or that mediocre installments (the third of any series) are just the price we pay for the good ones.

Oddly, people seem more ready to see this in comedy than drama, where no great tv show of the last 15 years goes without criticism for losing its edge (some never regaining it) and where everyone can see the problems of The Hangover or Pitch Perfect making sequels that largely repeat the plot of the original films. The Office, for example, had one great idea--bring Jim and Pam together slowly, then keep them together--from which they got three seasons of very good tv. Once that idea was done, though, there was nothing behind it, try though they might to recreate that magic--more shocks and twists than one might reasonably expect of a faux-documentary about a paper company. Why did the show stay on the air through a number of increasingly bad seasons to the point that it poisoned its own legacy? Economics.

This matters because critical standards can do something to help explain and interpret what we're seeing. The overwhelming tendency of American aesthetics for the last hundred years has been to divide out entertainment from art, to push one lower and the other higher, until there is very little room in the middle. If a property is meant to be entertaining, this serves to silence all possible criticism; if it is entertaining, it has served its purpose. Art is reserved for those things that aim at something more complex than entertainment. But since these are the only two categories, things end up wildly misplaced: the bad Marvel movies are intended only as entertainment, the good ones compete with the best of film. Prestige tv often cannot reasonably be said to attempt to entertain, so it must be art, after a fashion. But there are trashy attempts at being artistic--Rain Man, Braveheart, the run-up to Oscar season in any given year--and joke-factory workplace sitcoms that transcend being merely entertaining (Cheers, for example). Attempting to be art does not necessarily make art; having the trappings of art isn't art, either; that no one has yet recognized The Dark Knight Rises to be the highest of camp is a great disappointment to me--it looks and feels and acts like a deadly serious movie but has a scene with a football player outrunning a sinkhole as it forms. That place between entertainment and art is so often vacant because no one recognizes it even exists.

Sorting this out is a lot of work. So much easier to let it simply wash over you, and like or dislike to your heart's content, and not worry about it. That, however, is a recipe for knowing what date "Untitled Female Superhero Movie" will open on ten years from now, because the identity of the superhero matters less than knowing that the right market segments will be served in a timely manner.

In Which I Try to Understand Why I Like The Americans

The Americans

On paper, a show I should dislike immensely: period setting, focus on character, generally dark tone, regular violence. Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys (and Noah Emmerich and half a dozen others) are superb, a fine example of the way television still credits itself for artistic breakthroughs when reaching a level considered basic competency in a film--the actors are all good and credible in their parts.

Speculative reasons for enjoying:

1. The setting provides a neutral backdrop. 1980s suburban DC is just a place, chosen for the types of stories it makes possible. The show never deliberately stages either of the kinds of nostalgia that frequently appear in such shows: no "man, people were crazy back then!" and no "things were so much better!" of the sort that Mad Men can never quite manage to shake.

2. Female characters comma Large Proportion of. Mad Men may be Peggy Olsen's show, but after Joan or Megan there's a long way to go to another fleshed-out female character, and the show will periodically make clear that Peggy's professional success comes from her willingness to Work Like A Man. In the Americans, each male character has a female equivalent, and some of the female characters have no male equivalent. The female characters get all the same shadings of motivation and interest that the male characters get, and are much more rarely treated as obviously lesser because they are women. I suspect a body count would be evenly divided between men and women.

3. There's a moral weight to the violence, some large portion of which happens offscreen. Whenever someone dies, people are upset. If one of the characters did the killing--even if they have done a lot of it--the show depicts them struggling with themselves for having done so. All the spies know themselves to be morally compromised, and spend a reasonable amount of time struggling with that: they want to win, but not at any cost.

4. It's not a spy show in the same way that Archer is not a spy show. Archer is a radio program for English majors who enjoy literary and vocabulary jokes that uses a spy show as its pretext. The Americans is a show about marriage and relationships that occasionally does very intricate chase scenes.

5. Marriage comma A Credible Depiction of. The general options are to stick two happy people together and mostly ignore them, or generate a bunch of soap opera relationship complications. Friday Night Lights had its moments of tension between Coach and Mrs Coach, but they were ensemble players in a much larger story. The Americans excels at putting Elizabeth and Philip at cross purposes and then forcing them to work together, so that openness and vulnerability lead way to actual changes in their relationship, that they literally and metaphorically fight over how their family is going to be, how they will raise their kids, what their KGB-mandated relationship is supposed to consist of. They are parents, and they are married, and they have time apart from each other for things other than work.

Desert Island Top Five 30 Rock Episodes

I have a working theory that people can only ever be experimental across a few different types of culture. For the sake of balance, or time, there will be some area where they are utterly conventional. TV is that place for me: I'd subsist happily on a diet of Cheers, Friends, and 30 Rock without much complaint. The auteur-driven work that's more critically acclaimed sets itself up to be immune from criticism: if it's a drama that is occasionally funny, it gets credit for changing up the tone; if it's a comedy that spends as much time in drama, it's 'grounded'; if it's experimental, it doesn't matter whether the experiment succeeds or fails. None of this is particularly inspiring to me--watch as the loner genius man solves a gristly murder with the help of his only friend, bourbon. Just have a lot of jokes, and let most of them be funny.

"A Goon's Deed in a Weary World": Season 7 is an exercise in wish fulfillment, of which this episode--Kenneth becomes president of NBC, Liz meets her kids--is the highlight. Sad and happy at the same time.

"Rosemary's Baby": for a brief period, it seemed like Alec Baldwin would be able to do whatever he wanted. If his five-accents-in-two-minutes scene isn't right up there with his cameo in Glengarry, Glen Ross, someone isn't keeping score correctly.

"Leap Day": Ah, the made-up-holiday episode. Inspired.

"Cleveland": The song in this episode is the peak of 30 Rock music, which is saying something for a show that gave us "Muffin Top" and "Werewolf Bar Mitzvah," among others. It's also impressive that the season finale plot begins five or six episodes before this one--30 Rock never did a lot of plotting, but this is intricate and well-played.

"The Head and the Hair": the low-key early-episode fake-out and build: "we all have uncles who are cops" indeed.

One of the things I like best about the show Brooklyn 99 is its continual low-level insistence that the reason crime was so bad in New York in the 70s and 80s was at least in part due to the willful incompetence of the NYPD. The two 70s holdovers are represented as the least qualified and able, the detective who became famous is unconcerned with the quality of police work that gets done, and the people who would have been marginalized in that environment end up being invaluable parts of getting the job done.

As it turns out, the show's not wrong about how bad it used to be.

The Secret of Cheers, or How to Maintain High Quality for a Really Long Time:

Beliefs about a current renaissance of TV quality notwithstanding, I have occasionally pointed out that network shows are at an extreme disadvantage compared to cable because their runs have to be longer: 22 or 24 episodes rather than 6 or 10 or 13. This is also true of the length of shows themselves: 25 minutes in the 80s for a 30 minute show, rather than 22 (or less; Archer runs just barely over 20) now. Given that, I find it remarkable that Cheers is easily and obviously a better sitcom than anything else that has aired since: more time at a higher level than anyone else. Now, like most viewers, I don't like them all equally (I could ignore most Cliff episodes and not feel much loss), but the quality is always present.

The secret, as it turns out, is in the parenthetical above: there are a few episodes each season devoted to specific characters: 25 episodes might include...

2 Norm episodes (or 3)
2 Cliffs
2 Carlas
2 Coach/Woodys
2 Frasiers (after season 3)

...a couple that introduce random characters into the mix, and a couple that focus on aspects of Sam or Diane/Rebecca's personality that have nothing to do with the main story arc. So whatever that story arc is, it only has to drive 10-15 episodes in a season, sometimes fewer: you've just managed to create a smaller prestige show inside a larger network one. Further, the rules are different in the non-arcing episodes: Norm and Cliff have to end up pretty much where they start, and to the extent anyone else gets an arc, it sets up slowly over seasons; each episode is mostly an excuse for the writers to do a funny idea. It hardly matters whether it goes anywhere or not, since that's not the viewer's expectation.

Compare this to other shows, including those that are explicitly attempting to work within the Cheers paradigm, and it's clear how hard this is to do: Parks and Rec can hardly do a story without a significant Leslie component even if it's "about" someone else (this, I think, is why the Ron and Tammy segments are so well regarded), or how much New Girl flails around with how central Nick and Jess' relationship needs to be.

The thing that's funny about this:

"But surely some of the frustration with [Greta Gerwig's decision to do a CBS sitcom] is actually a projection of frustration at the medium she is (perhaps only temporarily) leaving behind, which is now so dominated by effects-driven—not to mention male-oriented—spectacles that there is no money for movies about people, emotions, and ideas—not to mention women. "

...is that all the examples of innovative TV work and movie-stars-going-to-tv are all white men. And it makes me wonder whether the relentless hyping up of Girls has at least as much to do with the fact that Lena Dunham must be present to balance out all that Great White Maleness so that tv looks more inclusive and radical.

Probably co-sign. I'm looking forward to the end of Breaking Bad if only to get to the end of people telling me I need to watch it. See also: Arrested Development. It's not unusual to want other people to validate one's own aesthetic choices, but there's a certain intensity to it that's off-putting. The funny thing about discovering late-70s punk in mid-90s real 'murrica is that it made tribal affiliation less important: when R.E.M. was the biggest band in the world I was the only person I knew who listened to them. So you find those things you happen to like, and if other people do, great, but the effort ends there. This is not to say I wasn't thrilled when my fiancée realized one day that she liked Parks & Recreation, but our relationship would have been just fine if she hadn't.

Two Related Points

1. Interesting that most of the items on this list of suggested tv adaptions are genre pieces.

2. It's still interesting that the word of choice for The Wire is 'Dickensian.' Assuming it doesn't mean "has a lot of characters," it's odd that the highest-praised tv show of all time equates to the work of a middle-of-the-road 19th century author who wrote like he was getting paid by the word (as he often was). There are, I think it's safe to say, no tv series that meaningfully ape Dostoevsky, or Zola, or Kafka, nor could there be--were they to engage in it, they'd fail as tv.* (There are, of course, many tv series that have gleefully inherited the spirit of Tristam Shandy and the like, but comedy is different.)

I think we're in a golden age of tv because people have accepted the limitations of the medium and lowered expectations accordingly.

The weird thing is there's lots of good stuff on tv, but then, there usually is. It's not necessarily the best stuff ever--how would we even know?--if someone were to suggest that the best albums of all time were recorded in the last 15 years we'd recognize the problem with that--the problem is not the material, but the hyperbolic overrating of that material.


*Lost might be Kafkaesque--a deranged version of The Castle in which they believe themselves to be making a character-driven drama but are actually making a science fiction show--but it was certainly unintentionally so. Which probably makes it more Kafkaesque.

So, if this Honest Trailer has it right, the appeal of Breaking Bad is that it's like an action movie minus the humor. Pass.

There's a great essay to be written about the rise of camp in serious and prestige film and movies, or, rather, the unwillingness to see it. In descending order: Francis Ford Coppola's serious and nuanced investigation of mob culture is adopted as an uncritical adoration of the same, as though Michael Corleone has a life any sensible human being would want. In Scarface, That Guy will overlook Al Pacino chewing the scenery and the film's over-the-top nature and take it all very seriously. Someone, somewhere, thinks of Goodfellas as an appealing portrait of gangsters. All of the complexity is read out.

Now, the last Nolan Batman movie was camp, what with its incomprehensible plots twists and one-liners delivered in all seriousness. When Catwoman busts through the doors to save Batman at the last minute, that's a scene right out of a 90s Batman film, or a particularly poor 80s action movie. The difference between this movie and the 90s Batman movies is that the latter at least had the sense to recognize the ridiculousness of the contrived situations it put its characters in. And yet this lack of self-awareness is considered a virtue, and rewarded. There's little actual complexity, but the po-faced insistence that it Addresses Themes Meaningfully will be honored, since everyone insists on it.

I made it ten minutes through the pilot of Breaking Bad, and feel no regrets over not having pursued it further: I'm through with antiheroes for a long while. But for those who do, it's probably worth thinking over what exactly the difference is between "I am the one who knocks" and "Hasta la vista, baby."

Joss Whedon's Theology

A weekend marathon of Buffy reminded me of the following: Joss Whedon's theology as expressed in that show and Angel has always seemed to me perfectly compatible with mainstream Christianity or Judaism. There is evil, of course, but it always loses. Evil is never permanently done away with, but that doesn't constitute a reason to stop fighting it. Victory may come at a cost, but no so great of one as to not want to win. But, most of all, evil always makes a mistake: there's always a flaw in the plan, something that cannot be anticipated. So far, so standard for genre.

The interesting thing is The Powers That Be: they're never wrong. Their plans always work. In those rare instances that they decide to act, their actions are effective and crush whatever the evil of the week has planned. The only question their behavior ever raises is why they don't intervene more. Evil, in this scheme, believes itself to have control over the world, but this belief is illusory.

Some of this is just storytelling: the deus ex machina is a venerable narrative device, and the point of having heroes is that they win. But The Powers That Be tend to slot in at moments which aren't purely narrative: "Amends" in season 3 being the most prominent, but also to affirm that characters have a purpose that is to be fulfilled, even if that purpose is unclear to them. All of which is perfectly compatible with a theistic view of the world.

Thinking a bit more about TV, and how we view and think about it:

The critical judgment of the average tv show is subject to odd standards, which appear to be infrequently noticed. Whatever renaissance there might have been in the quality of television programming, it tends to receive two contradictory but mutually beneficial standards: it must be more expansive than a movie or a procedural tv show, but more concise than a network tv show. Clearing either hurdle should be insultingly easy.

No one will sit through a four hour movie; most people won't sit through a three hour one. But no tv show gets less than four and a half hours, which is approximately the run of a season of Girls (ten episodes, something less than 30 minutes). If a tv show can't be more expansive than a movie, filled with greater detail and capable of sustaining longer and more complicated beats, then it's a complete failure. An 800-page novel might not be better than a 200 page one, but it should at least have more; whether the more is better--more complex, more intelligent, etc--is a side question. The patience granted to a tv auteur is incredible.

Most tv shows, especially broadcast tv shows, have to do much, much more than the minimum: New Girl in two seasons has done as many episodes as Girls will do in five. And this is deceptive over time: the first two seasons of Cheers had more episodes than New Girl, and each of those episodes was two to five(!) minutes longer--another four or fives episodes of material, at a minimum. Scripting 20 hours or more of coherent long-term narrative is difficult--every novel over 1000 pages is going to be a shaggy dog in one way or another--and most people can't do it well. Hence the perception that even the good shows on network tv aren't all that good, having to rely on stalling tactics are stereotypical plot drivers.

As a result, your critical darling tv shows--Breaking Bad, Mad Men, etc--get the benefit of being compared to movies when it comes to expansiveness, and compared to network tv when it comes to concision, which is to say the standard comparisons are in categories where they should be superior independent of the quality of the thing itself.

There's also a tendency to cut them a lot of slack--no one likes the first few episodes of Breaking Bad, but a believer will say that three or four boring hours at the beginning are a small price to pay; a Mad Men viewer will argue that the complete incomprehensibility of the first ten to twelve episodes of a season can be redeemed by the final episode (that's the big line of defense for the most recent season).

The point is that critical faculties tend to go absent at the moment they're most needed, and are only ever used to praise the creations we see with, perhaps, some small but irrelevant quibbles left to one side. Hence the modern phenomenon of quitting a show: pretending not to notice its flaws until the moment the accumulation of those flaws becomes intolerable. A more honest reaction would avoid making idols out of them in the first place, perhaps making the flaws more tolerable. Or, perhaps, leading to the conclusion it might be better to go read a book instead.