Premier Week is NOW!

As of this moment (me typing, not you reading), a new television season is getting ready to premier for most of the major networks. I typically don’t care about that sort of thing. But now I do. I’ve had a bit of a shift in my life over the past year or two. Nothing too major, but my life now has more television in it than it used to.

See, my wife has an incredibly stressful job. It’s a really long story, and not a very interesting one, except to us I suppose. But she really, really gets overwhelmed by her work. So, she spends what few free moments she has trying desperately to unwind. Typically by getting swept away in a television show or movie.

Now, I like TV just as much as the next person, I mean, we have 6 of them. You can’t really hate them if you own that many. We have one in the living room, the bedroom, her office, my office, and both of the remaining kids rooms (I say remaining because they’re getting older, they all don’t live at home anymore).

They’re all big and glorious in their HDness and all that. I’m just telling you that in full disclosure. I’m not a hater of TV. But I am a guy that prefers to read for the most part. As much as I love Star Trek, it doesn’t compare to a great novel. Books are just where my heart is.

But the missus wants to enjoy things with me, not separately. So I have, quite reluctantly, this year, been reading less of the books and watching more of the television. It’s our time to spend together and enjoy something. And it’s been here that I made a startling discovery.

Television is awesome.

And I’m speaking specifically as a concept I thought I invented,* but it turns out I didn’t, so damn. But it’s still interesting, and that is: A show as a novel.

So the missus was actively looking for a show to watch, something to geek out over as a respite from her day job, and I told her we should totally watch this show on HBO called True Detective. It’s a buddy cop show starring Matthew McConnaughey and Woody Harrelson.

This is like me trying to explain True Detective

So we watched. That show affected me in a way that I’m not sure a show really has, ever. It was a novel, broken down into 10 parts, it was slow, deliberate, and reeked of mood. The characters had arcs and the overall plot was tight and there were relatively few digressions.

It blew my mind. This wasn’t a serialized show, like Dallas or Falcon Crest (um, those two came to mind, I’m sure there have been more recent ones), this was a series that had a clear beginning, middle and end, all in a single season of television.

I didn’t know they could do that on TV.**

Then later, after that was gone and I’d spent a few months screaming at everyone I knew to go watch that show, we started on Breaking Bad.

And again, I couldn’t believe it. This was as enjoyable to me as 95% of the novels I’d read. It didn’t have the spec fic elements I’d need to put it at the very top of all time entertainment, but it was close. And I know it had a pretty deep connection with me, because once we were watching the show, I had a hard time reading after that. A book series that I’d started out thinking was pretty good became a chore to read. It was good, until I found something infinitely better. Going back to what I had before didn’t seem so palatable anymore.

Breaking Bad wasn’t as tight of a narrative as True Detective, but it was better, in my opinion. Nonetheless, I’m a guy that has been standing alone, screaming into the night that the masses are morons for wasting their lives watching TV when they can have the most amazing worlds on the pages of a book.

Now, I’m not exactly taking it all back - but I’ve shut up. Some of those scripted television shows are stunning. As good as a great novel.

What does that mean for me? Well, like I said, it’s premier week for the major broadcast networks. As of this writing, nothing has been shown yet, but the missus is a huge fan of the Agents of Shield show (which was, in my opinion, pretty awful for 3/4ths of its first season), and I’m pretty excited to just try some stuff out and see how it goes. Hopefully something great will emerge.

*This should totally be a subject of a post in the future, I have probably around two dozen great ideas, revolutionary ones, the ones that could start a whole branch of philosophy to explore their genius in greater detail.  But all of them, and I do mean all of them, have already been thought of, and explored ad nauseam, since well before I was born. Some of them going back thousands of years.

Stupid people, stealing all my ideas before I had a chance to think them. Every damn time I think I have something new to offer the world, EVERY. TIME. I find out in crushing fashion that I wasn’t the first. Or the most thorough, thinker.   

**Turns out, they couldn’t. It wasn’t TV, it was HBO.

When Things Don't Make Sense: Part I

As someone who creates entertainment, well, as someone who wants to create entertainment anyway. I want to do better. So when I'm reading, watching, listening to something. I'm always trying to take a mental note of how can I make myself better as a writer, artist, whatever.

I've also been watching some old sci fi TV shows. I watched the entire first season of Stargate SG1, the first few episodes of Farscape, even some old episodes of The Incredible Hulk. What did I learn?

Well, much like medical researchers that can learn a lot more about how the body works from studying a victim of a genetic disorder than from studying a thousand healthy people. I think I can learn a lot more from a bad hour of TV than I could from a dozen brilliant works of genius.

Stargate - the early episodes of this show were a real mess. I know it's early broadcast history was at least a bit unusual, but that show never should have made it past it's pilot episode. It did, and the latter half of the first season did improve, so much that I even enjoyed a few of the late season 1 installments. I am aware that this show has a huge fanbase, I haven't seen beyond the first season, so forgive me if I'm a bit critical.

What bugged me most? Really, and this might sound nitpicky, but it's probably because I was getting so bored watching the episodes that I let my mind wander.

Why does everyone speak English?

The movie the show was based on made a point that the linguist was there because he was an expert in ancient languages, the people of the world they visited spoke only a derivative of ancient Egyptian.

Switch to the pilot episode, the folks from that world still don't speak English, but everyone else they met in Season 1 did. People taken from other periods in Earth's history, Mongol, Greek, Roman, whatever it was, they spoke English. I'm willing to swallow a whopper or two for the sake of the story. I don't want to spend every episode watching while the characters spend 15 minutes trying to figure out that the inhabitants of the world they are visiting are saying 'hello'. It would get old, fast.

But give me something, especially if in some episodes, the lack of a common language is the cause of the problem. No one notices, questions this, or even comments on it. It's just assumed everyone will speak English. Although, at some point, maybe two thirds the way through season one, when a character on an alien world was posing in a threatening manner, Colonel O'Neal did ask for Daniel to find some term in any language the natives would understand... at which point the menancing character revealed that he could speak perfect English.

Again, one episode, the Aliens sit and listen for 15 minutes saying nothing, then they stand up and announce they've been learning English and can now speak it. They're super advanced. Of course, the team encounters a cave monster, an alien cave monster, trapped in a mountiain for centuries - it speaks English. Geez. Super advanced aliens, give them 15 minutes, stupid alien monster, it already knows.

Look at Farscape, a show whose early episodes shine when compared the first season of Stargate, (how ironic that Stargate's move to the Sci Fi channel led to the cancellation of Farscape) every inhabitant of any of the worlds encountered in the show are colonized by microbes in the brain stem that serve as universal translators. Again, whatever. I accept it and move on. It took five seconds of screen time in the first episode and doesn't have to ever be mentioned again. Problem solved.

What lesson did I learn? Well, if you don't know what the hell you're talking about, but you know it's a problem, make something up. Give me anything and if the story is good enough I'll buy it. Five seconds of screen time (or a line on the page) and we can all move on to enjoy the rest of the story.

If you can't do that, at least try to be consistent, maybe I won't notice.

Stargate and the Incredible Hulk - I only watched the classic two part episode of the Hulk, Prometheus. In that episode the Hulk enounters a meteorite that keeps him from turning entirely human when he calms down, he gets captured by the military and proceeds to smash everything. It wasn't until I saw this episode that I realized what had been bugging me about Stargate so much.

The SG1 team is military. But unlike any military I've ever seen. These guys are just about stupid. I've never served in the armed forces, but I'm pretty sure they don't work that way. My wife may not have originated this, but I heard it from her so I'll give her credit. She said, "If the story can only work if every character is an idiot, then it's probably not a very good story."

Amen. The Hulk gets away with it because it's a show that's nearly thirty years old. No one seemed to worry too much about how realistic anything was at the time. The only thing that really bothered me about the episode was that they dropped a giant half bowl onto the Hulk to keep him from getting away... then they lifted it by helicopter and it suddenly had this giant metal floor underneath it. Where did that come from?

The lesson learned? If I don't know how something works, be it military decision making or basket weaving. Don't BS your way through it, especially if it's integral to the plot.

These are only two points, and the lessons learned contradict each other, but that's okay. I will only apply these lessons intermittently - and never at the same time. I was planning on posting a third point, but it's so explosive, so game changing, that I don't think I can do it in this post. It would be like the Ghostbusters crossing the streams. The universe could explode.

You'll have to tune in next time to learn what the biggest lesson of all is.