Shades of Caruso

The 2010 – 2011 Caruso Awards: Lessons What I Learned, Part The First

Yesterday I announced the commencement of the Caruso TV Awards for the period between September 2010 and the beginning of October 2011, with a temporary lifting of my usual rule about not judging shows that haven’t finished their run by then. Thanks for starting Breaking Bad so late in the year, AMC. In that post I said I was going to go easy on shows I didn’t like, and the response was surprising. Turns out many think that’s a cop-out, or a disappointment. @Daisyhellcakes passionately argued that I should have the courage of my convictions. Friend-of-the-blog and excellent fellow @cockbongo was more direct.

Well, these Lessons posts are long and filled with all sorts of vitriolic complaining, so rejoice, those who thought I was going to be too nice! The difference here is that with a bit more room to explain myself, I can hopefully avoid the charge of just being a guy throwing stinkbombs at TV shows. I mean, yeah, I still am, I guess. But I also go on and on for literally thousands of words, and those thousands of words are a buffer between me and the possibility of coming off like the guy on the bottom half of the Internet who trolls for kicks. So, with no further ado, I finally deactivate my Caveat-O-Matic 3000 and just get on with it.

Be careful not to write your characters as idiots for the sake of convenience

One of the best lessons imparted by Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan in recent interviews (e.g. this one), shows how his magnificent creation manages to keep the audience on the edge of its seat, and how it finds new ways to jeopardise its protagonists each week; he intentionally forces his characters into a corner, and then makes them escape their fates using any means necessary. It helps that he has two main characters — Walt and Jesse — who are among the finest in fiction. They’re complex, relatable and — despite their awful flaws and multiple moral failings — sympathetic, simply because we can see through their eyes and understand what needs to be done to survive.

On a lesser show such as Dexter, our cuddly serial killer hero is painted into the same corner each season — his secret is about to be revealed, and the only way he can survive is to kill an innocent or a loved one — and is saved each year by pure fluke, deus ex machina, or the superior, unambiguous and often horribly overplayed evil of others. What’s more annoying is that the only way to get him into trouble is to temporarily make him stupid; a crime considering the show has been running for five years and makes a point of how professional and methodical he is.

The fifth season deserves some credit for coming up with new ways to dumb him down (giving him a crazed “partner”, the death of his wife messing with his head), but there are still a handful of moments where he conveniently drops 50 IQ points just to generate false drama. Also connected to this is the way Rita’s children are conveniently written out of the show early on just to ensure Dexter can get it on with Lumen. Bringing his step-daughter Astor back for one episode was actually the highlight of the season, precisely because it generated real complication and, in its resolution, real growth for Dexter.

Perhaps the worst offender for creating intentionally dumb characters is TNT’s militia-vs-alien drama Falling Skies. Note the incredible stupidity of the freedom-fighting 2nd Mass, who have in their ranks a young boy who has been rescued from the alien invaders who have taken control of Earth. On his back is a Harness; a creepy biomech thingy (designed by the remarkable Rob McCallum) that has attached itself to his spine so that he can be controlled by the aliens. Even after it is removed he continues to act as if he’s under the aliens’ control, talking in a monotone and referring to humans as “Them”. This zombie-like behaviour, with ominous staring and plodding footsteps, goes on for five episodes before anyone twigs that he’s not to be trusted.

Even better is when they capture an alien weapon and promptly dismantle it instead of using it. Pope — the Ham Tyler of the show — seems proud of this, and never thinks the weapon might be useful. It takes a child to suggest using it against the alien invaders. It takes about three episodes for this kid to drop some wisdom on the idiot freedom fighters. The show is littered with conveniently dense characters, as this was the only way to drag three episodes’ worth of story out to ten. See also Torchwood: Miracle Day, V, Camelot, No Ordinary Family (in which, at one point, a villain kills off her powerful mind-controlling minion in order to clear the way for some guy with claws, because claws beats mind-control every time, apparently), etc.

Don’t waste our time by retelling the same stories or using the same tricks each week

Oh, The Killing. If only we could have captured the negative energy you created with THAT finale. Goodbye oil, goodbye gas, goodbye windfarms and solar energy and biodiesel. Hello limitless energy, with the only waste product the occasional expression of dismay from our exhausts; roads lined with cars belching out, “worst red herrings ever,” “relentless one-note tone,” “bog-standard police procedural with delusions of grandeur,” ”Michelle Forbes was quite good though.”

There isn’t much more that can be said about Veena Sud’s remake of Forbrydelsen; SoC was as frustrated as almost everyone else with the season’s open ending, though its reliance on red herrings was the absolute worst things about this first season. The moment when Rosie Larsen’s best friend Sterling Fitch reveals that a nosebleed was responsible for turning the school’s basement into what looked like an abattoir was when the show fell into a hole, never to be recovered. The Muslim “kidnap room” and the presence of paint stripper in poor Bennet Ahmed’s house were further insults. Even the hope that a plot about the disappearance of a Muslim girl might allow the show to touch on racism in the media and the police force was foolish; it was another red herring. This was not a bold new storytelling experience. It was a merry-go-round covered in crimson fish guts.

The anger is still fresh for those of us who got burned, but it’s not the only show wasting our time with dead-ends. Dexter has been telling the same story every year with almost no change. Killing Rita off at the end of season 4 is the boldest thing the show has done, but by the end of the fifth he’s still the same guy; a serial killer trying to come to terms with his feelings about the people around him while hiding his true nature and delivering endless voiceovers that give away everything about his inner life. It’s Groundhog Day for people who read those tacky inserts about Fred West in Sunday tabloids.

Doctor Who‘s long-arc game has also alienated me, but this is partially a fault of mine. After watching it for so long, the endless running, the gabbled dialogue and that cacophonous, distracting soundtrack have worn my patience thin. The last four episodes of the season sat unwatched on my PVR until yesterday; after years of enthusiasm I suddenly had no real urge to put myself through yet more unattractive pouting from Amy, or dopey-faced clowning from Rory. Matt Smith’s Doctor is delightful, but everything else has worn me down.

Part of that is the feeling of deja vu wafting from it. Whenever Steven Moffat’s name is on the script the show becomes a riot of imagination, with a brightness to the dialogue that makes it feel like nothing else. The rest of the time (or at least a lot of the time) there’s just more dialogue, as if the cumulative braininess of Moffat’s less frenetic interactions can only be matched with ten times as many lines, each with a lower individual IQ. As Moffat can’t write everything, the show falls into a rut with the Doctor rattling off comments as if he’s having an argument with himself, while Amy and Rory stand there looking frozen.

What’s worse is that despite the enormous blank canvas offered by the show (taking into account budgetary concerns, of course), too many plots or plot elements are recycled. Two episodes in the recent half-season featured characters miniaturised and sucked into a hostile environment; what’s worse, those two episodes aired back-to-back. Too often now the Monster-Of-The-Week is actually some poor pitiful creature who is misunderstood and needs the Doctor’s help. Fair enough, it’s a kid’s show, and you can’t have truly vicious enemies in it, but with The Silence’s motivations kept mysterious, the show now lacks menace; creepy, over-directed atmospherics are not a suitable substitute.

As I said, much of it is still fine. The finales of this split season were enormous fun, and some episodes did a great job of dramatising the Doctor’s increasingly depressed state. For example, Toby Whithouse’s The God Complex did a much better job of showing the Doctor’s growing sense of unease with his effect on the ones he loves than Moffat’s A Good Man Goes To War with all of its nonsense about the Doctor being a bad man. Nevertheless, the show has begun to lose its appeal, at least for this viewer, simply because it seems to have used a number of lovely, distracting enhancements to make it look like the show has a number of tricks up its sleeve when in fact it only has that handkerchief illusion and a dog-eared Ace of Diamonds.

Even if you’ve got a good finale, the show still needs some meat in the weeks before that

This is a problem that has taxed the patience of SoC for many a year, but this year it started to affect good shows as well as bad. V, Heroes and FlashForward are perfect examples of shows that plotted for a finale, meaning there were weeks where nothing happened; a week of potentially diverting drama sacrificed to protect the sanctity of the blowout finale. Of course there are bound to be slow weeks in any drama; even the best show on TV – Breaking Bad – has episodes that “merely” move pieces into place, set the tone for the season, or resolve the events of a previous episode. There’s also Treme, a show which makes a show of doing as little as possible for an entire season, but as it places a premium on mood instead of plot, that’s forgivable.

Network shows are particularly bad for treading water, but this year even SoC favourites like Sons of Anarchy, or highly anticipated prestige shows such as Boardwalk Empire or The Killing, misjudged their pacing. Sons was particularly disappointing. The first two seasons moved like freight trains, but showrunner Kurt Sutter’s experiment with a slow pace ended up alienating many fans, all of whom he then called very bad names. Do you realise the risk SoC is taking by daring to criticise his show? We really liked the finale, Mr. Sutter sir! Please don’t call me a douchehole.

Anyway, that was still preferable to Boardwalk Empire‘s amble toward a finale that underwhelmed, with only the occasional surprise to enliven a journey which seemed to be mostly made up of simmering resentment between couples and glowering from Michaels Shannon and K. Williams. When the show woke up it was riveting, but too much of it was spent reiterating the show’s theme as explained by Steve Buscemi’s Nucky Thompson – “We all have to decide how much sin we can live with”. That was a point that could have been made definitively and then abandoned halfway through the season, but the games played between Nucky and Margaret Shroeder covered this ground until the grass was tramped flat and the soil turned to mud.

The Killing was the worst of all. To keep the show going for thirteen weeks it had to employ tricks to deceive the audience; red herrings and deceptions of such transparent stupidity that the viewers rose in furious anger and smited showrunner Veena Sud with anonymous complaints on the internet. Unfortunately no one realised that this form of attack, which is potent against normal showrunners, is actually some form of psychic sustenance for Sud, who reacted with remarkable confidence considering everyone who saw that FUCKING finale thought it was the worst thing in the world since people dancing in Star Trek movies.

Compare those shows to some of the best examples of season-arc pacing of the year. The Good Wife and The Vampire Diaries both split their long seasons up with smaller arcs, allowing them to rattle through plot at a clip while never losing momentum or running out of things to say. Their last episodes were as good as the ones at the start; that consistency is a marvel worthy of emulation. Nevertheless, even that kind of construction can go wrong. Doctor Who‘s split season led to a deflation of what little pace had built up when the show wasn’t dicking about with pirates and suchlike.

Build your seasons with multiple pay-offs, is what I’m saying. Be prepared to race through the plots quickly; there’s a good chance the complexity this creates will give you even more dramatic opportunities. Look at Breaking Bad (again). In season three the Big Bads (The Cousins) were originally meant to last all season, but Vince Gilligan realised it was probably a good idea not to waste time by keeping them out of the action for too long just to create a contrived final showdown. The result was the best season of TV between 2009-2010, and arguably the best season of TV in history.

Okay, thanks for reading this far. More to come as the week progresses.

October 5, 2011 - Posted by admiralneck | Boardwalk Empire, Breaking Bad, Camelot, Dexter, Doctor Who, Falling Skies, Heroes, No Ordinary Family, The Good Wife, The Killing, The Vampire Diaries, Torchwood, Treme, V