The Only Winning Move

The BBC’s Life on Mars is one of those things where you like the whole but none of the parts. If someone asks if you like it, then yes, you like it, but when they ask what you like about it, all you can do it point to its flaws. Having just finished the final episode, I now know that this was because my trust in the writers was justified, and that all along the show they were showing me wasn’t quite the show that seemed to be playing, and that the flaws were features, not bugs. Or rather, I think I know it. Even now I can’t quite shake the feeling that I’m making excuses for a basically mediocre show that I like for independent, irrelevant, and ultimately superficial reasons.

That probably doesn’t make a lot of sense - so let me step back for a moment and say what’s definitely good about the show, no matter what perspective you take: the acting. John Simm is pretty much perfect in the lead role - as DCI Sam Tyler, a Manchester policeman who gets hit by a speeding car and wakes up in 1973. And I’ll put in a bid for Dean Andrews‘ performance as Ray Carling being generally underrated by critics. The problems are with the shallowness of the character more than Andrews’ work; there’s only so much anyone could do with that role - but Andrews pays a lot of attention to the detail and gets all the mannerisms exactly right, and so there’s a creepy edge to a character who could’ve been just so much necessary background noise. We’re never comfortable with Ray because we’re never sure if he’s just too dim to know what’s wrong with him, or if he knows and doesn’t care. As for Philip Glenister as Gene Hunt, it’s hard to know if the acting is really good, or if I just really like the character. I choose to believe it’s that if I like the character, then because Glenister made him likeable. And Liz White and Marshall Lancaster are, of course, convincing as Annie and Chris, repsectively.

But that’s about all you can say about the show without hedging: the acting’s really good. As for everything else, it’s all pretty much contingent on what you take the show to be about - and that’s the central puzzle. The opening voiceover has Sam wondering whether he’s “mad, in a coma, or back in time.” Actually, we’re never much fooled about this. For meta-fictional reasons if nothing else, it has to be that Sam’s in a coma. He can’t be mad - that’s just unsatisfying. And ok, it could be that he’s back in time. At least in the first season, the writers are careful to reference Doctor Who nearly as often as the Wizard of Oz. But time travel stories are all about altering the future in some way, and the first episode is the only time it’s completely clear he’s done that. And besides, who writes a time travel story about being a cop in 1973? Quantum Leap at least had Sam (neat, eh?) jump in and out all through his lifetime righting wrongs - and it’s really stretching it to call even that show science fiction! I could maybe believe it of Life on Mars if it wasn’t such a straight-ahead cop show most of the time, but it is, and so I don’t. No, it always had to be that he was in a coma, and it doesn’t feel like much of a spoiler to confirm that that’s what it was. The “central puzzle” is more of whether and how much of a choice Sam has about staying in his coma-induced fantasy, and why it is that he’s chosen this time and place. Is it the 1970s that Sam’s imagining, or 1970s cop shows?

And that’s where it comes down to whether you trust the writers or not - and it’s not always an easy thing to do. A lot of episodes, especially in the first season, have endings that are a little bit too neat. They send off a gangster from whom Gene has been taking bribes, for example, with little or no fear that he will buy off the witnesses, or expose Gene’s corruption in court, or send some henchmen out for revenge - or even use some higher-up who, unlike Gene, is still taking bribes, to see that he never reaches the prison. This is, of course, perfectly OK if we can believe that some part of Sam chose this setting for wish-fulfillment reasons, and that the 1970s he’s imagining is based more on cop shows than history. But it’s not so cool if this is meant to be the real 70s - such as if he were back in time, or perhaps working out some personal issues from his real life that have their roots in 1973.

For this reason, the first season finale is both satisfying and not. It’s satisfying if Sam is working out some personal issues: he has an opportunity to arrest his dad - and it’s strongly implied that Sam can go back if he does - but he declines. It turns out that Sam’s dad disappeared from his life in 1973, and the conflict is kind of the one that got him here in the first place - that between duty and personal life (Sam’s original accident happens because he’s not paying attention out of frustration that his girlfriend, also a police officer, has been kidnapped by a serial killer after having disobeyed his instructions not to follow a suspect). It’s easy to see the psychological repair mechanisms at work here: Sam needs to reassure himself that rules and procedures are there for a reason - becuase if he’d acted like Gene Hunt in 2006, he could’ve busted the suspect before he had a chance to nab Maya. And of course, he can’t quite reassure himself - probably not the least of the reasons for which is that his fantasy puts him in a position to choose between devotion to police procedures and the possibility of repairing his family problems. But if that’s what’s going on, then some of the other episodes seem sloppy - and that’s because they play like Sam is just enjoying being in a 70s cop show fantasy. Which are we to believe?

I don’t really know - but the thing that saves the series for me is that the series finale (the series two finale - there were only two seasons) allows me the interpretation that Sam deliberately chooses to stay in the fantasy. Indeed, they make a big deal about whether or not Sam will be “strong enough” to come out of his coma. On the literal side, it’s “strong enough to survive the operation,” but on the metaphorical side it’s “strong enough to embrace painful reality over comforting fantasy.” There’s something oddly gratifying in the idea that he might not have been. And I mean that specifically in two senses. First, on a meta-fictional level, I’m hugely gratified that this is the first meta-fictional exercise I’m aware of that doesn’t make the choice to embrace the fantasy seem immoral. Generally, when an author (or team of writers, in this case) remind We the Audience that we’re dealing in fiction, there’s a kind of finger wagging quality about it, as though They the Authors were made of sterner stuff than we are becase they have the inner strength to separate fact and fantasy to a degree that we can’t quite. We’re left feeling a little small for even wanting fiction in the first place, and that’s always seemed a bit rich to me as a lecture coming from people who make their living writing fiction! In this case, however, given all Sam’s been through, we can understand such a choice. Which is the second sense: in addition to not coming across as an exercise in author superiority, the show acknowledges that there’s something comforting about the crudity of the 70s in general, and that all the advantages of the modern world come with a price. It’s the same sort of thing that makes The Queen is Dead a much better denouncement of the monarchy than God Save the Queen, actually: Morrissey’s version isn’t simple black and white; it recognizes that there’s an emotional and cultural cost in the break with tradition. We can empathize with Sam’s choice, because we all have this baser side to our natures. In the 70s, Sam feels superior to his comrades in many ways, even as he admires their character. In 2006, he’s just another officer. By choosing the 70s, he chooses to be on top of a small hill rather than halfway up a bigger one - a choice we all can understand, if not necessarily endorse - the same way some dark corner of our minds might choose to be the richest man in a poor country rather than of average wealth in a rich one. There’s a soft side to it too: he feels needed in the 70s. Who needs him in 2006? And then there’s the honesty of the 70s. Even though Mad Men, for example, is meant to be read as an expose of just how miserable people actually were in the early 60s, I suspect that one of the reasons it’s such a hit is because it relieves us of some burdens imposed by the politically correct norms of the present. It’s not that the attitudes we adopt to women and minorities in the present are wrong or inhuman, because they’re not. But the price they come with is one of having to worry a lot about how you come across to other people, and so it’s understandable when modern people fantasize about living in a time when that wasn’t so necessary (that it was necessary in possibly different ways in the 70s is beside the point - Sam is dreaming). And this works on a character level in any case. How many people haven’t joined the police thinking to be cool and beat down the bad guys only to be disappointed by the tedium, the paperwork and the restrictions? This must especially be so in the CSI world of today; never before in history have an individual officer’s instincts been so farmed out to science. The individual patrolman is hardly the hero anymore. So this is gratifying on another level - the level of reassuring the viewer that everyone has these weaknesses and fantasies. Comforting in the same sense of choosing the deeply flawed Peter to be first among equals, if you’ll pardon the Bible reference.

Unlike Abigail Nussbaum, however, I don’t take this to mean that the authors are endorsing the fantasy world. It’s true enough that Sam’s choice - to do his duty or save his friends - is a false dilemma, but it’s part of a fantasy, and one of Sam’s own making. It’s easy to loose sight of this - but ultimately it’s SAM who’s set up the dilemma. The authors, I think, are still outside of it, as are We the Audience. They aren’t, as Nussbaum would have it, really asking us to “believe that when it comes to the way policing should work, Sam’s Starsky and Hutch fantasy is somehow superior to our modern reality simply because there’s less paperwork and fancy words,” nor is “the self-aware, parody-cum-homage to 70s cop shows is taken in by its own facade of earnestness.” Rather, I think it’s working more like Seinfeld. In that show, we laughed for 9 seasons at characters being shallow and selfish and investing a huge amount of emotion into incredibly minor things. It was only as the series ended that we knew for sure that the creators disapproved of the main characters’ inability to grow, but nothing about that implies that the creators hated the main characters. Quite the contrary - the main characters were patterned after none other than the creators themselves! The point of the exercise there was to empathize without sympathizing - to recognize ourselves, and, by implication, our own small-mindedness, in those characters and wallow in it for a bit, so that when the show went off and we went back to the real world, at least we had the benefit of knowing that we’re not alone, that everyone struggles with these issues, and that the demands placed on us to pretend to be nobler than we sometimes are actually are burdensome, if ultimately right and necessary. And that’s how I think we’re to read the ending to Life on Mars as well: the writers invite us to understand Sam’s choice without necessarily endorsing it. There is - there just is - a part of all of us that wants to live in Starsky and Hutch-la la land. This is why we like genre shows in the first place, actually - because of the wish fulfilment element. The point that I think a lot of people don’t get about fiction - and a surprisingly large number of writers don’t even seem to get about fiction, for that matter - is that there are levels to wanting things, and the level at which we want to believe in the things that happen in the fantasy isn’t the same as the level at which we want things in our real lives. This can be hard for some people to separate some of the time, but in the general case people know where those lines are. We enjoy shows like Life on Mars precisely because life IS stressful, and sometimes stressful for reasons that we’re not always at liberty to talk about in public. In the case of cops, yes, that means wanting to crack skulls to nab the guys you KNOW - because you have the best gut in the world - are bad. I, for one, can’t help but find the idea that cops have this fantasy reassuring - because it indicates a real desire to get on with the work of making the streets safe for the rest of us. The temptation to cut corners is only there because they’re frustrated at the roadblocks that stand between them and nabbing the bad guys. It’s a healthy frustration. That it IS frustrating means that tension has to go somewhere, and that’s what fantasy is for. And that it IS frustrating also means that they are, in real life, operating within the rules (if you actually are breaking the rules regularly, they’re hardly much of a roadblock now, are they?). It’s this kind of place in which genre fiction is rooted. And it’s this space in which Life on Mars operates too, albeit much more self-consciously than most shows. (That, ultimately, is born of the same tension. You just can’t make shows like The Sweeney nowadays without hedging - something that the creators admit they were doing, the way. Hedging, I mean. Using the implication of time travel to get them off the hook for having remade The Sweeney.) Sam’s choice is wrong as a real-life choice, the message seems to be, but as a fictional choice it’s the same choice we make every time we turn on the TV, and that has its purposes too.

Or at least, that’s how I choose to read the series. IF that was the intention all along, and I enjoyed the series because I picked up that all along, then it is a truly remarkable show. If not, well, it’s an average show, still worth watching, but nothing really special. Still, I suppose it doesn’t really matter which is which, since in the end, I saw a show I liked, even if I only imagined it.

So yesterday was the 40th anniversary of Scooby Doo Where are You!, a show whose importance for my childhood (despite the fact that my parents didn’t let me watch it, or pretty much any TV) cannot be overstated. Here’s a link to my favorite episode on YouTube.

Actually, I’ve never even seen that one, but how different can it really be? Scooby Doo truly put the “formula” in “formulaic.”

But what a great formula for kids!

And I make no apologies for thinking that the film version was the best big-screen comedy of the 2000s. Happy 40th, Scooby Doo!

Well, they say a stopped watch is right twice a day. So I feel lucky to have been wasting time when one of these Yahoo! entertainment blog posts got it right. It’s a thing on which shows to watch and which to avoid, and it’s nothing like comprehensive, but Buffy makes the “must watch” list (and even mentions that season 7 was crap!), as does The Office. And by “The Office” they don’t mean the one that stars that doofus from that merely mediocre movie by the same people who brought you the simpering, snivelling, audience-insulting, lives-in-its-wife’s-purse WORST comedy of the 2000s. Nope, they’re talking about the delightfully uncomfortable, takes-it-too-far, absolute ace original UK version. Shows that correctly made the bad list include “Sex and the City” and “Battlestar Galactica.” OK, I admit, I’ve never seen “Sex and the City,” but my understanding was that as a penis-bearer I’m required to hate it, so I’m going with that until I see evidence to the contrary. What’s cool is that they get Battlestar right: brilliant show up to a point, and then it’s just absurd. I draw the line a little sooner than they did, but the point is that it started off great and then at some point before the close jacknifed into an overturned truck of cow dung.

Of course, it’s the Yahoo! sponsored blogs, so perfection is over the rainbow. “Lost” is listed as one of the good shows, which it isn’t, and even though I haven’t seen “The Sopranos,” I’m not going to let their blacklisting stop me from getting around to it someday. But credit where it’s due, eh?

Recently I’ve been watching House - a show I passed on as it was airing, and it’s easy to see why. It’s a straightahead medical drama - a genre I hate - that contains no elements of scifi or fantasy - the genres I love. It’s brazenly formulaic. The same shit happens every week with little to no connecting story arc (though, to be fair, there’s also no reset button - episodes reference previous episodes without continuity errors). All told, not something that sounds like my cup of tea. But this one’s ace, as it turns out, because it has Hugh Laurie in the starring role, he’s perfect in it since he’s more or less playing himself as he is offstage, and, given what kind of guy House/Laurie is, it’s an hour-long gratuitous snarkfest. It’s meant to be a medical mystery show (House is patterned in some ways after Sherlock Holmes), but it works in many ways more like an edgy comedy. House may not be one of the greats, but it’s certainly entertaining.

I’m almost done with Season 1, and thought I’d share my favorite moment. House has lost a member of his staff and has to replace her, and so he and friend/colleague Dr. Wilson (yes, as in “House and Wilson,” aka “Holmes and Watson”) are interviewing a bunch of people whom House has no intention of hiring. Here’s how he passes on one of them:

Dr. Spain: You know, I really admire the way you don’t care what anyone thinks. You just do what you want, the way you want.

Wilson: So, you went to Hopkins for both undergrad and med school?

Dr. Spain: That’s right.

House: [looking at Wilson] He’s in a band.

Dr. Spain: You into music?

House: Totally. What kind of music do you play?

Dr. Spain: Um, mostly blues, you know. James Cotton, some original stuff.

House: [pops a Vicodin] Oh, dude. You are so hired.

Dr. Spain: Really?

House: Not a chance.

Dr. Spain: Why?

House: Tattoo. [Dr. Spain turns his right arm to reveal a kanji symbol on his forearm.]

Dr. Spain: Wow. I thought you’d be the last person to have a problem with nonconformity.

House: Nonconformity, right. I can’t remember the last time I saw a 20-something kid with a tattoo of an Asian letter on his wrist. You are one wicked free thinker. You want to be a rebel? Stop being cool. Wear a pocket protector like he does and get a haircut. Like the Asian kids who don’t leave the library for 20 hours stretches, they’re the ones who don’t care what you think. Sayonara. [Dr. Spain leaves.]

Wilson: So should I go through all the resumes looking for Asian names?

House: Actually, the Asian kids are probably just responding to parental pressure, but my point is still valid.

Yeah, OK, not terribly believable stuff, but man is it gratifying. Just thinking you’re hot shit isn’t, by itself, any more annoying than being lazy or stupid or spitting a lot or being a really inconsiderate driver. What gives hipsters courtside seats on that extra-warmed bench in Hell is this collective delusion they all suffer from that they’re doin’ their own thing when in fact they’re classic middle management. It’s like being in a frat but without the honest contract and associated guarantee. Only on TV do you get one to put his devotion to the Church of Nonconformity bluntly enough to get sent up for it - but hey, that’s what TV is for!

Paul Graham’s essays are really hit-or-miss, but his second-greatest hit - that one about nerds - is a gem. The basic point is that every kid wants to be popular, and nerds are nerds because being popular is a HUGE amount of work, and you only have time to be really good at one thing, and they’re more interested in being smart. The reason I liked the essay is because it doesn’t try to paint nerds as noble rebels like so many other similar commentaries. Graham’s under no illusions: nerds want to be popular, just like everyone else, they just don’t want it badly enough to actually have a shot at achieving it. Right. And if nerds aren’t popular because they’d rather be smart, then it implies that what’s keeping hipsters from being popular is … laziness. The hipsters are the kids who couldn’t be bothered to make a real go at being popular either, but in their case it wasn’t because there was some other substitute that they wanted more, it was just that they didn’t understand why it should be an effort at all. Were they not born awesome enough that people should come to them and admire them? Apparently not, they discover upon entering junior high, so they settle for the next-best thing - which turns out to be like the first-best thing, except less honest about what it is. But this has a side-benefit: the lack of honesty about the fact that the “hip” crowd is also a crowd with enforced dress codes and music tastes does give you a little bit of wiggle room. After all, to maintain the illusion that you’re being open and accepting to everyone, you have to actually do a little bit of it from time to time. And so everyone in the “hip” crowd gets to have a quirk, something that’s off limits to criticism, just to show how non-conformist they are. You know, one of them watches Sesame Street religiously, the other one has an 8-track collection, yet another one listens to Anne Murray and even goes to her concerts. Play your hand cleverly and your quirk can be something that you actually like, though - so you’re getting something for your second-class status. But in the end, being a hipster is work too, which is why there are also hipster Christians (if you’re unsatisfied with your position in the straight-ahead hipster hierarchy, you can always be a youth group leader). And of course it’s no great mystery why all hipsters go on to be Socialists. The reason why Buffy’s Cordelia Chase was always a sympathetic character - contrary to high school drama cliche - was because she had open eyes and a work ethic. Hipsters have neither - and insofar as Socialism is the politics of kidding yourself about where money comes from as an excuse for not working as hard as you should it fits like a glove. (That Cordelia gets replaced by Anya Jenkins , an unabashed capitalist, when the character got sent to Angel is surely no mistake.)

Being one of the nerds Graham talks about, I’m happy to confirm his theory. I DID want to be popular in Junior High, but I was unwiling to work at it because being smart was more important to me. Being popular meant having really dull conversations with really silly people with absolutely no guarantee that it would pay off. And I think, in retrospect, that at least some of “them” felt the same way - the difference was, exactly as Graham suggests, that the payoff was worth it to them in a way that it wasn’t to me. The hipster option wasn’t really available at the preppie paradise that was my junior high, but it was in high school, and at first it seemed like a good compromise. But the illusion got blown off pretty quickly. I’d been taking ribbing from my friends for listening to the Bee Gees for 2 years. Sean Mackay lets slip that he likes them too and suddenly it’s hip retro? Clearly these people are playing by the same rules but with a cheaper set of toys.

Just like pimp wear is royal garb on the cheap, being a hipster is popularity on the cheap. And like all cheap things, it’s to be recommended ONLY when you know you’re being economical. Carob is not chocolate, soymilk is not milk, tofurkey is not turkey, and hipness is not popularity. If you’re playing the hip game because you have better things to do with your time, fine. Excellent, in fact. But if you’re playing it because you couldn’t be bothered to put in the overtime it takes to be popular, you’re a pathetic life failure and I have no respect for you.

The fun of House isn’t the medical jargon (which you can’t follow and probably isn’t completely accurate anyway), or trying to solve the mystery (which you can’t since they withold clues), or keeping up with the characters (since there’s so little to keep up with). It’s watching Dr. House send up annoying people in poliically incorrect ways. I’m glad they got around to taking a shot at hipsters.

There is an interesting but misguided post on io9 about a new show on Fox called Reincarnation. It speculates that this show is a watershed that means the end of TV SciFi as we know it.

Um, probably not. SciFi fans live with a not wholly unjustified seige mentality that they tend to take a little bit too far - and this is an example of “taking it too far.” Sure, there isn’t as much SciFi on TV as straight demographic research would suggest there should be, and sure, what SciFi does make it onto TV does have an annoying tendency to get made by people who confess in interviews that they hate SciFi. But meagre though our slice of the pie often seems to be, I don’t think it’s shrinking. Certainly it’s not shrinking in any unprecedented way that points to terminal decline for the genre!

But Charlie Jane Anders is annoyed enough by Reincarnation to think this might be The Big One - and I think it’s interesting why.

The show is apparently Dead Again: the TV Series. It involves a Mulder/Scully team consisting of a professional “Regression Therapist” - someone who takes people back into their PAST LIVES looking for the source of emotional trauma - and a disbelieving ex-police detective sidekick. Only this time Mulder is a girl and Scully is a guy, but no matter. Needless to say, past lives are real, and these episodes are all human interest/detective stories with the twist that there’s a supernatural element. A superficial glance at scenes from the pilot suggest that the supernatural element is just a schtick: there isn’t anything to put the “Speculative” in “Speculative Fiction” in this one at all.

That, of course, is the complaint - to wit, that this is the same kind of crap show generation algorithm that spawned the deplorable Quantum Leap. Take a SciFi premise, remove anything that could be remotely appealing to SciFi fans, and produce in its place a sentimental cliche porta-potty show that belongs on Lifetime, but market it to scifi fans anyway.

It’s easy to see why I’m not worried that Reincarnation is some kind of watershed. Quantum Leap came and went just ahead of a general explosion in SciFi programming in the 90s; it didn’t kill anything (except possibly its fans’ imaginations - but that was a mercy killing). The premise isn’t exactly the same, but the effect probably will be.

The thing is, detective novels and shows frequently resort of importing psychic themes to liven things up. There are countless examples of this being tried - and it never, ever works. And it just never will work, and that’s becuse the detective and psychic genres are simply not compatible.

Detective fiction serves to empower its readers - to make them feel more in control of the world around them. There are essentially three strategies you can take with this - let’s call them the Rationalist, Scientific, and Badass strategies. The Rationalist strategy is Agatha Christie and her many imitators. The detective hears the story from a couple of people, sits down for a while, thinks real hard, and figures the whole damn thing out. The message is that no matter what it is, it works according to the world’s logic, and any attempts to hide things will spawn inconsistencies that you can always spot if you just pay enough attention. The Scientific strategy is Sherlock Holmes and modern police procedurals. The message is that no matter what it is, it left little microfibers and scratches and some sort of lab test will tell you exactly what’s going on. The Badass strategy is Philip Marlowe and film noir. This is the coolest subgenre, being the most cynical - but even though the hero gets beat up a lot and left for dead, he always has a clear street smart, an uncanny ability to see through bullshit, that sets him apart from his world. The world may be rougher in noir, but the hero is still gifted with insight.

No matter which of these strategies a work of detective ficiton takes, it should be obvious that throwing in psychic elements brings the whole thing down. It’s no fun if the detective is handed the solution on a platter! Nor does it soothe anyone’s need to make rational sense out of the world if your crucial information all comes from somewhere the very nature of which you don’t understand. All psychic phenomena do in detective fiction is call attention to the fact that it’s the author doling out clues in a way that’s convenient for his story - precisely the meta-textual information that we have to be distracted from if we’re to believe in the story. It really is like pulling back the curtain on Oz and showing us that there’s a machine.

It’s also easy to see why this inherently unstable genre blend gets tried so often, despite virtually no record of success (OK - The X-Files - but you gotta admit that calling X-Files a detective show is pushing it). It just smacks of network executive out of touch gimmicks. They think “Well, ‘mystery’ is contained in ‘mysterious,’ so why don’t we have a mystery that’s REALLY mysterious!” Pedestrian fucking wankers.

io9 Commenter jokono gets it right:

Yeah, like Quantum Leap. Or… BSG. To me, BSG signaled the end of scifi.

BSG is, of course, the reimagined Battlestar Galactica. And I totally agree. If TV SciFi dies and you want a plausible culprit for what killed it, look no further. BSG was a for-real trojan horse. It pretended to be SciFi so hard that it convinced a lot of us that it really was. It wasn’t a totally worthless ride. The first season and a half had some of the best and most consistent character interaction I’ve seen on a show of any genre ever. I was really in love with BSG for a while for that reason. But it was never SciFi, and unfortunately an awful lot of people kept hoping against hope that it would be long enough to make it to the final episode, which is just a giant spiders web that traps genre fans like flies and feeds them to the Evil Hippie Spider wholesale. We’re talking every retarded brainfart from the late 1960s in one giant technicolor bong, ladies and gentlemen: we decide to give up civilization as a bad mistake and never dream again. There is NOTHING less “SciFi” than that!

Reincarnation, as far as I can tell, doesn’t hate science fiction fans, doesn’t want to punish them for being science fiction fans, and isn’t marketing itself as hard scifi. It’s insipid, maybe, but it isn’t malicious. I wouldn’t worry about it. Every one of the approximately 6900 times this experiment in genre-blending has been tried, it has failed, and not with a bang, but a whimper. I see no reason to expect this one will fare any differently. If you want to worry about something, worry about Galactica. Or maybe Star Trek.

Now that I’ve finished all three of the films in the new Wallander series, I can make cogent comparisons. In order, and with all ratings out of 4 stars:

(1) Sidetracked - ** - This is the one I wrote about a bit already. Its strenghts are its weaknesses. The production values are first-rate, but they also get in the way. Television shouldn’t look like a film school project. The solution is a little too obvious. Now, I understand that the schtick in the Wallander novels (from reading on the internets - I’ve never cracked one myself, you understand) is that the police can be a little slow, and they make mistakes. They’re human. Apparently Mankell achieves this by keeping the reader both ahead of and a bit behind the police. Fine. But this one just lacks any kind of subtlety. I knew the bad guy (note: not the same as the killer) shortly after he opened the door. And alright, I missed guessing the killer - but that’s my fault for being thick. I would wager a guess that 65-70% of the people who watch this guess within about 45seconds of screen time of meeting him who it is. But the real trouble with this one is that the political point weights the whole thing down. Which is a shame, really, because even though it was written by a Socialist for a Socialist audience, it’s one of those points of reference where Libertarians and Socialists overlap. The gist is basically that the world is a giant and complicated place, and things don’t always work out, and that the most of the evil in the world starts with people thinking that they are above the law - stepping outside their boundaries. The only thing a decent guy can do is just find out what he’s good at and do that to the best of his ability - though sometimes this can feel like batting for the wrong team. Of course I agree with all that - but did they have to make such a sledgehammer out of it? So this one’s bad in all the ways that it’s good. A little restraint would have helped.

(2) Firewall - ** - Starts out with one of the best narrative hooks I’ve seen on TV in a while. I can’t remember a time when I’ve so much wanted to know just what the hell is going on. This one’s fast-paced and action-packed and keeps you involved so well that it takes you until about 70% of the way through to realize what a mess the plot is. Unfortunately, way back near the begining when they still had you well distracted, the story walks to the edge of the cliff of literary respectability and just takes a headlong plunge into the sea of the worst kind of unbelievable, uninformed, impossible-to-suspend-my-disbelief pulp fiction. The technical aspects of the series are so good that they get away with it for a while - but the plot is the skeleton of any story: can’t stand up without it. And this one is a real stinker. They can’t hide it from you forever, and by the time the episode is nearing an end you’re stifling giggles. I won’t give it away, just say that yes, the title “Firewall” indicates an internet conspiracy plot. In small-town Sweden. Why not?

(3) One Step Behind - **** - Fortunately, they took the time to film this one as well. It’s simply wonderful - from start to finish. Makes the whole series worth it. The frustrating thing about the other two episodes is that the potential is so obviously there. Kenneth Branaugh is of course a great actor, and he was born to play this role. And everyone else on cast is really good too. And even though the filmschool shots get really annoying (mostly because they’re more noticeable on television than in the theater), at least some effort is put into making it all look pretty. But it seems like there’s always something lurking about to sabotage this series - and it managed to ruin the other two. Honestly - it wasn’t absent in this one either. The plot doesn’t make a terrible amount of sense, and while we get one or two of the big questions answered by the time the credits roll, we’re a far cry from knowing all we want to know. It’s easy to forgive here, though, because it may well just be by design. This one is partly about obsession - Wallander is driven to find out who killed one of his cowokers. That killer happens to have killed a lot of other people as well, but by the end of the story we really only have a good idea about why he’s killed the coworker. That’s believable: Wallander is a police officer, his job is to bring the guy in, not expose his motive. So he brought the guy in (or, erm, got him killed). Mission accomplished - and if he didn’t ferret out the motive in the other cases, exactly, well, that’s because he had no personal interest. That will, of course, be a deal-breaker for a lot of people, but I rather like unresolved endings.

Overall, this series has huge amounts of potential. I’m a bit mystified at all the sabotage, I have to say. Is it deliberate? Is there some greater point to putting together a brilliant series only to dynamite each episode in some way? I just don’t know. As Brett Ashley might say, it’s pretty to think they’re doing it on purpose - but my hunch is that these flaws are in the original novels, and they’re the fault of an author who can’t decide whether to be John LeCarre or Ian Fleming, but who is in fact Colin Dexter with a social conscience. No matter - I’ve enjoyed watching them. The BBC says it plans to make three a year until they stop being popular. They’ve got my attention for next year.

If you heard that the BBC’s new Wallander series is Inspector Morse with better production values and in Sweden, you’ve largely heard right. And if that appeals to you, then you’ll probably like it. But lest you miss the moral, I’ll give it away: production values are important, but they aren’t everything.

I embrace, applaud, am down with and otherwise approve of the recent trend of bringing cinematic production values to television. But here’s the twist: television has a lot of advantages over cinema, and if you don’t know what those are, you miss the boat and are working in the wrong medium. Inspector Morse was great TV. These Wallander films are good films that happen to be shown on TV. That difference is important.

Here are some pieces of life wisdom I picked up from watching Wallander, and making the obvious comparisons with Inspector Morse, in no partcular order.

- Apparently it’s not just the flag that’s yellow and blue in Sweden - EVERYthing is. And I don’t mean just the yellow fields and blue skies. No, I mean when scenes fade in Sweden they go blue and then come out yellow. Except for the times they fade out yellow and come in blue. You get my point. Techniques like this are either subtle or they’re boring, and that line is drawn differently on TV than in the movies. For the approximately 2 people who missed the camera color art going on, they helpfully throw in some bizarre lamps and Volvos.

- There’s a difference between great acting and being the character in question, and one is for the movies and the other is for TV. What Kenneth Branaugh does as Wallander is great acting. What John Thaw did as Inspector Morse was being the character.

- The “detectives are human too - they’re slow, they miss points and make mistakes” schtick is great. Thumbs up, I love it. But it is possible to take it too far. Even if the detective stumbles along for the most part, it’s still nice when, in the end, he does manage to put the pieces together through an insight here and a good gut feeling there.

- It is easier to forgive the writer for making things convenient for his pet social statement in movies than it is on television.

- On television, to a greater extent than in movies, it is important that we like and identify with, rather than pity or otherwise look down on, the main character.

To people in the know, it will be obvious that I prefer the Inspector Morse series to the Wallander series, though not on all points. People in the know will probably also agree with me. But people in the know will enjoy Wallander too, and so I recommend it to them.

Apparently there’s talk in Tinseltown of redoing Buffy without Joss. io9 has the scoop AND (*gasp*) even cautiously approves.

I was cocking my gun when I got to the bit about it being the original 1992 movie and NOT the TV show they were talking about. That’s good. That’s very good.

I’m a rabid fan of the TV show, but I have no real attachment to the original movie. I enjoyed it when it came out, don’t get me wrong - but it was forgettable, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the TV series they ended up making, so there’s that.

And … alright … it does seem a bit unfair that Joss Whedon doesn’t get a second crack at it, considering how much he felt he’d sold out to commercial and producer pressure in the making of the first one. In a more just universe, I guess he’d have been able to go back and fix his mistakes. But in other ways I think I’ll take io9’s side on this one: it’s probably a good thing if they make it without him. Here’s my thinking:

(1) How talented is he still? Buffy the TV series was brilliant - a one-of-a-kind gem. I’ve seen it (way too) many times, and I get something new out of it with each viewing. Hats off - absolutely - to the captain and creator. But the stuff he’s made since has been … well, a little on the mediocre side. Angel was just horrible - erm, the bits of it I could stomach, anyway - I admit I didn’t make it very far. I’ve heard nothing but bad news about Dollhouse. And Firefly … what to say? It was good, I enjoyed it, it had potential. But it also had a tendency to slide into corny and easy stories, and the worldbuilding just wasn’t all that convincing. Now - we only got the one season, and there was clearly potential for greatness there. Mr. Whedon doesn’t have the best of luck with his first seasons - let’s not beat about the bush here. That’s almost certainly because his stories are refreshingly character-driven, and it’s hard to write great stories with characters that are still embryonic, as season one characters on any show tend to be. So maybe Firefly would’ve gone on to great things. The final (Whedon-penned) episode - Objects in Space - was by far its best, after all. But there was also the movie Serenity - which was just terrible. Torture from beginning to end. I’m inclined to say any second season of Firefly would’ve been a failure. It’s not unusual for writers to burn out a bit once their opus magnum is complete. Having done Buffy and done it damn well, it may well be that Whedon doesn’t have anything special left.

(2) It keeps the movie separate. Buffy is a closed cannon as far as I’m concerned. In fact, I’m even pretty iffy about season seven, which in general I didn’t much like (despite some real brilliance at the begining), and I’ve never read the comic books. I like Buffy just as it is. TV shows are hard to get right, and when you get one this right, it’s best to leave well alone. If the intention is to keep the movie separate from the series - which I think is absolutely the right choice - then not having Joss Whedon on the project just makes that separation easier to maintain. The way there are some bands that were great in their day but just really shouldn’t get back together … well, you get the idea.

(3) This isn’t a genre he created anyway. One of the annoying things about Joss Whedon is that he has a creative formula: take any two seemingly incompatible genres, mix them, and then claim that you’ve invented something new. For example - I got really sick of hearing about how creative it supposedly was to take the western genre and mix it with the space opera genre and spit out something “unique” like Firefly. Truth be told, “unique” is not a word that applies to Firefly because people have been mixing westerns with space opera since the 30s. That you haven’t heard much about it only goes to show how unstable the solution is. Ditto the mixing of gothic horror and film noir for Angel. Those are two genres that work quite well together if you ask me - but again, we didn’t have to wait for Whedon’s auspicious birth to get there. Horror and mystery are well related to begin with - dealing, as each does, in slow buildup to a final, preferably shocking, revelation that plays on one’s sense of security - and it isn’t too much of a stretch to take a dark sensibiilty from one genre and make it work with a dark sensibility from another. “Teenage girl fights vampires” just seems … inevitable in this feminist age. This is a genre that belongs to the culture at large - it isn’t the sole preserve of one Mr. Joss Whedon. Poaching should be encouraged at this point.

(4) Whedon is bad at paying his intellectual debts. Call this one the “petty reason” - because it IS petty - but I take a certain satisfaction in seeing someone poach from Whedon in particular. OK, granted, it’s the Kuzuis doing the movie - and they worked on the TV show - so it’s not as blatant as it could be. I’m just saying. One of the more gratifying drive-by comments I’ve seen on the internet was one that said “I used to watch Firefly back when it was called Blakes 7.” I’m pretty sure I gave an audible cheer. Not to mention the bits of poaching from Twin Peaks (not just the admittedly excellent dream episode with the red drapes - look also in the background in the first episode and tell me if you don’t see a student dance across the hall in exactly the way it happened in the Twin Peaks pilot) that went on in Buffy and which Whedon denies to this day. Ideas are free for borrowing in genre fiction (well, unless you’re borrowing from His Royal Insecurity Complex Mr. Harlan Ellison, who invented everything let me tell you what), but you’re supposed to leave some hint where they came from. So nice of Joss, for example, to reference Forbidden Planet in Serenity (a ship C-57D has crashlanded on a planet called Miranda), but since he wasn’t imitating Forbidden Planet in any way it doesn’t count. Dropping some reference to “Liberator” or “Avon” or “Star One” or “Spike Spiegel” would’ve been a more honest choice.

So as long as it’s not TV’s Buffy they’re remaking, I have no particular objections to doing it without Joss.

Better is still not to make it at all, of course. I’m against remaking things that were got right the first time, or which don’t seem to suggest a second treatment - and Buffy is one of those things. The original film doesn’t need remaking because it wasn’t all that … erm, sorry … original to begin with. And the TV series is near-perfect as is. So while I don’t object to remaking the film, with or without Joss, neither do I see the point - and that alone is an argument against.

Having just rewatched season one of Babylon 5, it was a bit of serendipity to come across this excellent essay on the show by Abigail Nussbaum, Israeli computer scientist and (hobbyist?) genre literary critic.

Like Nussbaum, I have a complicated history with Babylon 5. I missed (didn’t even know about) the pilot when it aired - apparently around the same time the execrable Deep Sleep Nine hit the waves (this one I watched with friends as it broadcast). Which is just as well, because it turns out to be wince-inducing to an almost unbelievable degree. More on this later. The following year the series proper went on the air, and being the nerd I am me and my equally nerdy roommates counted down the days to showtime. So imagine my disappointment when they opened with Midnight on the Firing Line, which was pretty god-awful in its own right. I decided immediately I was done with the thing. My somewhat more forgiving roomies talked me into watching the second episode, but about halfway through I realized I had forgotten to check that the number of bristles in my toothbrush was some multiple of a prime. I’m pretty sure they watched episode three before giving up themselves, but in any case Babylon 5 ended up symbolizing for all of us everything that’s ever been wrong with TV SciFi.

Several years later, when I guess the show was somewhere near the beginning of season 3, unrelated friends started telling me they liked it. And since these were people I respected who were not necessarily science fiction devotees, I eventually decided to give it a second chance. I found some reruns on one of my trips home on TNT and watched them and was - well, I was going to say “pleasantly surprised,” but “shocked” is more like it. It was suddenly really engaging. I cared what happened, was curious about even minor plot details - and yet, it was so clearly the same awful show I remembered from 1994. Cognitive dissonance is a bear, what can I say? When I told my old roomies I was watching it I mostly got smirks. I’m pretty sure to this day they haven’t gone back and given it a second view.

I ended up buying all four seasons (like Nussbaum, I’m reluctant to count season 5 as part of the same show, though unlike her I recognize a couple of good episodes in there) as they came out on DVD to get caught up, and I’ve seen the whole thing through a couple of times now. But that was all pre-gradschool. Since I’ve been here (i.e. since 2003), I’ve had to budget my time a bit better, and so it was only recently that I thought about going through it all again. But I did over the last couple of weeks rewatch season one and … well, damned if I don’t feel like I’m back at square one.

Here’s Nussbaum:

Up until now, I’ve always thought of B5 as a better-than-average show with a poor first season, an execrable fifth season, and three deeply flawed yet ultimately successful middle seasons. And as it turns out, I was wrong, because Babylon 5, from beginning to end, both sucks and blows.

It does at that. And she’s even right about why:

More than anything else, Babylon 5 is a show for teenagers. The overblown dialogue, the broad humor, the melodramatic plots, the frequent monologues and speeches, and just in general the show’s palpable sense of its own profundity must have been irresistible to the teenage set–to viewers looking for something grand and inspiring who weren’t too interested in, or capable of, noticing the bad writing and obvious plotting.

All correct. And I’d like to leave it at that, I really would. But this all puts me in quite a difficult situation. If the show is such crap, and I know it’s crap, and it’s obvious that I always knew it was crap even from day one when I could barely make myself sit through the first episode … then why do I still enjoy it? And why do I still enjoy it not in the “guilty pleasure” sense of watching something like That 70s Show, but enjoy it as for-real escapism?

The only thing I can come up with in which MY BRAIN isn’t simultaneously inhabited by a 48-year-old Pakistani shoplifter is that Babylon 5 did manage to accomplish something in its own accidental way. Certainly not in any way that Joe’s Mighty Senseofselfimportance thinks it did. To read any of his chatroom quotes from back in the day on The Lurker’s Guide to Babylon 5 and keep a straight face you’d have to believe he was Shakespeare reincarnated come to make television respectable. But no - I mean just in the quiet way of managing to be one of those epic space opera/fantasy novels that we geeks like to read while also being on television.

The point to get here is that while there is plenty of genre television, and while there is plenty of escapist television, there is precious little escapist television for space opera fans. Television - in America, anyway - is and always has been horribly prejudiced in this way. There is no shortage of tear-jerkers for people who like that sort of thing. There is no shortage of sexual melodrama for people who like that sort of thing. There is no shortage of action-adventure for people who like that sort of thing. Police procedurals, courtroom dramas, locked-room mysteries, you name it. Everyone gets what they want - except scifi and fantasy fans.

Or at least, that’s how it was back in 1994. The reason me and my roommates were excited about Babylon 5 wasn’t because we’d actually heard anything about it or had any idea what it was going to be about. We just saw the spaceships and the space battles and had some vague notion that there would be interstellar political intrigue, and that was enough for us. And it was enough because genuine space operas are so rare on television that beggars can’t be choosers. We’ve never had the luxury of - as, say, mystery fans have - of looking at the 5 or 6 new series guaranteed to be out in the fall and deciding which of them we’d like to see. Babylon 5 was just all there was.

Yes, yes, Star Trek. What about it? If you want to count the original series as space opera, I guess I’ll let you get away with it - but that’s precisely the point, you see. That show ran from 1966 to 1969 for a whopping total of 72 hours of campy television (that I love, don’t get me wrong!) that we more or less had to make do with for 30 years. Buck Rogers in the 25th Century was plain horrible. And while I guess back in those days we all had some affection for the original Battlestar Galactica, try catching it in reruns … or taking it seriously when you did. Everything else either wasn’t space opera, or found some way of massively apologizing for itself. Yes, Star Trek: The Next Generation, I’m talking about YOU.

Massively apologizing for itself. That’s the part that sucks so bad about being a scifi fan. In the magical world of paperbacks, people aren’t so selfconscious. Straight-ahead space opera exists, and it even reaches a profit-generating audience. Sure, there are those annoying authors who can’t say often enough that SF to them is “Speculative Fiction,” and that they sleep through space battles. And some of them even aren’t annoying and write really engaging fiction that does deserve to be called “high art,” sure. But there is good old fashioned space opera too, and I’m glad of it. Try to put it on TV, though, and suddenly up is down. Suddenly you need all kinds of treknobabble to flatter the audience’s vanity that it’s all on the scientific up-and-up. Suddenly you have to devote whole episodes to please-mix-glass-shards-in-with-my-corn-flakes pop psychology to convince the producers and the critics that you do “character studies.” And don’t even get me started on the endlessly irritating self-parody shows. It didn’t even take X-Files a whole fucking season to start strapping on its tapshoes, flashing its huge white teeth and saying “yesSUH!”

So sure, Babylon 5 was crap. Just as Nussbaum says. Yes, she’s right that there’s nothing at all plausible about a seasoned politician like Londo accepting Mr. Morden’s sketchy offer to mysteriously wipe out a whole Narn fleet for him without first checking what the bill would come to. Sure, I’m not buying it either that an EarthGov politician actually says “peace in our time” without being aware he’s just struck a Chamberlain bargain (only has he really? Another annoying thing about that arc is that there’s no real sense in which Earth comes to regret its cowardly decision. Earth has other problems of its own making, so it was a misplaced reference in any case). And yeah, Sheridan’s “weighty” decision - between holding out a hugely ephermeral hope of finding his wife versus saving the galaxy - isn’t actually weighty at all, and all the misplaced Churchill reference does is call attention to just how unearned the gravitas here is.

That’s all true - and yet I’m right with Nussbaum on this bit too:

I can’t put my finger on it–maybe it’s just that unearned sense of profundity, getting to me as thoroughly now as it did when I was a callow teenager–but I care about this world. I may be cracking snarky comments every five minutes, but when it comes down to it, and the music swells and the heroes strike their pose and the lovers are reunited, I’m touched, and I want more. I can’t stand any of the parts, but I still love the whole.

I can’t stand any of the parts, but I still love the whole. What a brilliant way to put it. Yes, that’s what it is for me too. All I do when I sit and rewatch Bablyon 5 is nitpick about what’s wrong with it, but when the episode ends I find I’ve enjoyed myself immensely - NOT for the ironic pleasure of picking apart bad drama, but because I’m really glad to have seen this story with these characters in this world.

Here’s where she and I finally part ways a bit:

Maybe, in much the same way that Ronald D. Moore has extracted the beating heart of something as campy as the original Battlestar Galactica and transplanted it into a better, smarter body, someone will come around one day who can take whatever it was about Babylon 5 that worked, the core of the story that’s still bringing me back, and give it the treatment that J. Michael Straczynski couldn’t.

I don’t think so - because I don’t think there’s actually anything beating at the center of Babylon 5. There is nothing intrinsically special about this show at all. The only reason it’s watchable in the first place is beacuse Straczynski managed to somehow cast Andreas Katsulas as G’Kar, Stephen Furst as Vir, Bill Mumy as Lennier, and, what the hell, Peter Jurasik as Londo and Michael Doyle as Garibaldi. And really - out of that lineup - just Andreas Katsulas. He’s the only truly brilliant actor on the show, the first one to find a way to take his wooden lines and make them sing - and gradually the others got the courage to follow. No - I don’t think there’s anything special about this story or this world or these characters. There WAS something special about Battlestar Galactica. It was a really intriguiing premise really poorly told. If any show in the history of television deserved a second chance, it was that one. I don’t think Ronald Moore had to scratch very deep to see that the diamond in the rough of the original campy mess was how people react to an existential threat.

By contrast, the “diamond” in the rough of Babylon 5 is nothing special to this show. It’s all in the “meta-”bits. The theme of evolution by violent chaos versus evolution by slow deliberation has been done before, and better, by other shows and novels. No doubt someone (anyone!) could do a better job with it than Straczynski - but no matter because it’s been done before and will be done again. No, what’s special about Babylon 5 was just that it was unapologetic space opera at all. It was the first - and to date ONLY - time I’ve seen space opera on television by a genuine space opera fan who never felt the need to pass it all off as allegory. That isn’t to say that there isn’t allegory in Babylon 5 - obviously there’s plenty. The point is that it isn’t allegory as a way of apologizing for being space opera. It isn’t allegory as a means of legitimizing our fun. It’s allegory only to the same degree, and tackling the same grand historical themes, that allegory is always at the heart of space opera. We aren’t kidding ourselves with literary mumbo-jargon about how the epic scale brings the weight of individual decisions into stark relief. No - what we’re doing when watching Babylon 5 is daydreaming about being the kind of person whose decisions change something as big as the universe.

As much of a self-important, ego-inflated gasbag as I think Straczynski probably is in real life, I can’t ever feel too bad about him for the simple reason that he did what no one else, that I can tell, has ever done. He put Lord of the Rings on TV AS Lord of the Rings - AS the kind of literature that we genre fans like - and not with some moronic sop to the mainstream viewer.

There’s something about being a genre fan that’s like having a sexual fetish, I think. We’re all human, and we all have our quirks, and some people’s quirks are more acceptable to society at large than other people’s. For whatever reason, science fiction isn’t one of the acceptable quirks. And so liking science fiction is a bit like being gay. You can pass yourself off as normal if you have to, but there’s always something about your tastes that’s just slightly “off” enough to tip people off to what you are. And you can go all out and embrace it, but then you’re giving up friendships with ordinary people forever. Most of us spend most of our time doing something like those gay activists assuring people that gay marriage is just like regular marriage, only with two completely committed guys rather than a guy and a gal. Some people buy it - more people pretend to buy it so as not to look bigoted - but here in scifi fandom we all suspect more than the outsider even that SF literature is not literature by the same standards at all - just as gay marriage isn’t marriage by the same standards. And even while we spend so much time producing perversions like “Next Generation” to show just how normal we are, in the privacy of our own minds we prefer stuff like Babylon 5.

So I think of Babylon 5 as space opera’s “comming out” party on mainstream TV. And the same way that while not all gay men like disco music, there are few gay men who don’t miss that scene - I think while we space opera fans might privately think Babylon 5 was cheap and over the top, we do miss the days when we could turn on the TV and see something that was made for us.

There’s nothing special about Babylon 5 itself, and so there’s no need to remake it. Making ANY similar space opera - i.e. NOT one like Ronald Moore’s reimagined Battlestar that only pretends to be science fiction while actually being a hippie gaiafest - would be a better tribute than trying to find something unique to this one that just isn’t there. Babylon 5 was almost entirely derivative. The Minbari were the Japanese, the Centauri the Romans, the Narn proably the Arabs, etc. etc. The Chaos vs. Law fight of the Shadows and Vorlons was straight out of Doc Smith. Sheridan back from the dead is pure Lord of the Rings. And all the stuff with the PsiCorps - the most interesting and least-explored part of the series - flirts with Philip K. Dick and Alfred Bester. Stracynski, in other words, is a genuine science fiction fan remixing his favorite songs. If there’s something in Babylon 5 we like, it’s that we’re proud that one of our own made it on TV without selling us out. So it wasn’t the best it could be. It was what it was, and that in itself is a kind of minor miracle.

Heartfelt thanks for that, Joe!

Adam Roberts’ review of True Blood Season One is correct in much of what it says, but it so spectacularly misses the point about the central theme of the show that I’m kind of awestruck. This is worth mentioning because I think Mr. Roberts’ misunderstanding is the result of a cultural blindspot that is underdiscussed.

Some background. True Blood, should anyone have missed it, is an HBO series about to go into its second season. It’s based on Charlaine Harris’ gothic mystery novels set in a version of our world where vampires are real and have recently “come out” owing to the development of a synthetic blood substitute that enables them to feed without killing. An intriguing premise to be sure. Naturally, since there are vampires involved, the story is stupider than it has to be; you’ll find no counterevidence to the generalization that people who read and write about vampires tend to be those who like to play with fire in complete safety. Well, OK, that’s not entirely true. Since you twisted my arm, there is a handful of scenes that get at something like making fun of your stock vampire fans. That is, we see some pretty naive people at Fangtasia (yes, that’s its name), the “Vampire Bar” in nearby Shreveport. But for the most part the vampires and their relations with normals in the show serve The Larger Point.

The Larger Point being that 500lb. battle axe that Adam Roberts had to bend over, cover his head and kiss his ass goodbye to miss being conked over the cranium with.

Here’s Roberts:

By the end I found myself thinking that the show just doesn’t handle its symbolic overtext very well: for the “vampire rights movement” stands, in some obvious way, for the civil rights movement. Vampires get the verbal abuse and day to day hassle—being pulled over by the police, being refused service in bars and so on—that in the real world of the US Southern States are the preserve of blacks. The show, in other words, is attempting something of the same trick that gave Planet of the Apes the resonance to make it a culturally significant text, rather than just a bunch of actors in simian makeup: the apes in that film (and TV series) worked both in terms of the logic of their particular worldbuilding (as cool, talking apes) and as symbolic signifiers articulating the racial anxieties of 1960/70s America. I’d go further and say that Planet of the Apes managed that articulation with a winning degree of sophistication and penetration.

Well, yes, Mr. Roberts, Vampires are a standin for something, but I don’t think it’s the Civil Rights Movement. They’re a standin for gays.

C’mon, this isn’t difficult, right? They’ve only recently shown themselves to the world for what they are. Many of them, in fact, choose to remain hidden - something they can do because to all outward appearance they are the same as anyone else. And as far as we can tell, they don’t reproduce in the normal way, but rather by converting people to their “lifestyle.” And just in case anyone out there in TVland was thick enough to have missed it, this thoroughly unsubtle show even includes a bit of “God Hates Fangs” signage in the (excellent) opening credits sequence. Any resemblance to a favorite slogan of Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church is not at all coincidental and entirely intentional. (Alright, fair enough, there are pictures of Klansmen too - but followed almost immediately by scenes of blacks and whites baptising each other at the same revival. To the extent that the race relations images in the opening serve any purpose beyond establishing the setting, I’m inclined to think it’s to establish the connection between the Gay Rights Movement and the Civil Rights Movement that gay rights activists are so fond of drawing - NOT to imply that this is a show about the Civil Rights Movement itself.)

Indeed, given the critical tradition of intepreting all things vampire as having to do with repressed sexuality, it would be a bit surprising to see them suddenly standing in for race relations instead. That’s not to say it couldn’t be done. How much room established cultural symbols give an author to reinterpret and maneuver is not entirely clear, but no doubt a skillful writer could make vampires fit the “oppressed racial minority” trope. But I’m pretty sure he’d have to alter them in some way, because your run-of-the-mill vampires are about as white as it’s possible to be. I’m not just talking about the unearthly pale skin that so many writers make so much of - it’s everything to do with their tastes and habits as well. Indeed, “oppressed” is not usually a word that springs to mind where vampires are concerned. One is more apt to think of them as privileged and aristocratic - generally socially and politically superior to those they feed on.

And that is certainly how the writers of True Blood paint them. The story’s two most prominent vampires - Bill and Eric - are a landed gentleman and a warrior king respectively. And the others of lower caste still have massive superiority complexes where normals are concerned. We don’t, as far as I remember, see a single vampire that wishes to be normal - but we see plenty of normals who are fascinated by vampires. No - these vampires aren’t blacks, and this isn’t a story about the Civil Rights Movement. Sookie isn’t the plantation owner’s daughter who ran off with one of the slaves, and if 911 is a joke to vampires its because they don’t seem to WANT normal doctors getting too close a look at undead anatomy. To the extent that vampires have neighborhood watch meetings, they don’t seem to waste much time complaining about their oppression and rallying the troops to do something about it. It’s something like the opposite of that, actually: the bigger concern among vampires seems to be that they’d be lowering and indeed confining themselves by joining mainstream society. Lack of general acceptance certainly doesn’t seem to be something they think of as denying them any opportunities, and vampire culture is hardly something they’re eager to share. Quite the contrary, the seem to think normals unworthy of sharing their culture and allow them to as explicit inferiors. It’s hard to imagine they would ever have allowed a vampire Buckwheat or Mr. Bojangles in the movies, and you certainly don’t get the feeling you’d ever catch them telling Br’er Bunnicula stories to normal children.

No, vampires don’t have black concerns, attitudes, or problems, and that’s because they’re not meant to be blacks. Roberts has simply got it wrong. Think of them instead as homosexuals and it all falls into place. Homosexuals are oppressed, sure, but not in anything like the same way or for the same reasons that blacks were (which is why, incidentally, it is disingenuous of gay rights activists to compare their struggle to the much more difficult Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s). These vampires don’t seem to lack educational opportunities, for one thing. If anything, like gays, they’re more educated on average than the normals. Also, like gays, they seem to be financially considerably better off. There’s a freedom and hedonism in their current culture which they are afraid of losing if they go completely mainstream - the main reason why it’s not obvious to them that going mainstream is such a good idea, actually. There are all the “coming out” parallels, and the not-so-subtle suggestion that the normals all harbor repressed desires to be like them - a repression that manifests as equal parts revulsion, fear and fascination.

So how did Mr. Roberts miss this? I think the following complaint sheds some light on the matter:

Tara, driven by her unrequited love for Jason (something which, incidentally, I never believed for a moment) at one point pretends to be his girlfriend so as to give him an alibi. “You think that since the Vampires came there’s no racism anymore,” she tells the police. “But you don’t know the sorts of looks a mixed-race couple get in this town.” But the problem here is that, despite occasional assertions like this, the show itself dramatizes no black-white racism at all. It could do, of course; it just doesn’t. Black characters and white characters are friends; they work together; they date and socialize entirely without tension (in one scene the—black—short order cook responds assertively to abuse from a group of rednecks; but the abuse is on account of his homosexuality, rather pointedly not about his skin colour. Because, you know—rednecks are famously scrupulous about their bigotry like that). This leads to a rather peculiar set of representational logics. Racism is — clearly — a problem. But in Bon Temps, racism is only a problem for vampires.

That’s because, you blockhead, it isn’t racism that’s the problem - the problem is what the politically correct like to call “homophobia.” What’s wrong here is in the line “Racism is - clearly - a problem.” Oh? And how does a Londoner know this about Louisianna? Why, because he’s seen it on television, of course! Mr. Roberts - who apparently only knows the American South through stereotype - is frustrated because television isn’t playing to his preconceptions. The show is set in Louisianna, therefore any political statement in it must be about blacks, and furthermore any failure to show constant racial tension must be inauthentic and an oversight on the part of the writers, a serious flaw in the show. But is it really? In that scene where Tara plays the race card to get Jason out of trouble, it’s not a commentary on real racism, it’s a commentary on playing the race card. The sheriff and his deputy both know, as Tara knows, and as we the audience have seen, that there is no longer a problem with whites and blacks dating in this town, though there presumably was in the past. Tara is improvising, and all concerned seem to know that the sheriff’s white guilt is only good for so long (Jason will be picked up again shortly). As for rednecks and their bigotry - what parallel universe is Mr. Roberts living in where white racists have a problem with blacks cooking for them (in the scene Mr. Roberts is refering to, the rednecks send their burger back because they ordered it “without AIDS”)? Indeed, if he’d ever met any actual southerners or been to the actual South, he’d know that local stereotypes hold blacks to be much better cooks than whites, that in fact southern cuisine is about 2/3 black and 1/3 white - even among the white population - and that in any case it would be basically impossible to avoid eating food cooked by a black short-order cook if you frequent those kinds of restaurants. And whence comes this golden rule of discrimination that Mr. Roberts seems to be quoting whereby truly bigoted people are required to focus on all marginalized groups their victim might be a member of simultaneously? I’ve certainly never heard of such a thing. Bigots I know are generally happy to focus on whatever characteristic it is they’re focusing on and leave the rest alone - for example, picking on a black girl because she’s a woman and not mentioning her blackness - or vice versa, as the situation suits. Notice, incidentally, that I say “bigots” rather than “rednecks,” because it is in any case offensive that Mr. Roberts thinks he knows enough about rednecks to decide in what manner and to what extent they’re “famously” bigoted. No doubt his daily experience in London gives him ample opportunity to study such people in their native environment that he has knows their habits to a level of expertise?

The truth about “rednecks,” and the South in general, actually, is that they are much less racist than television gives them credit for. 40 years ago the South was everything that Mr. Roberts seems to still think it is today. But 40 years ago is a long time - and the intervening 40 years have been nothing if not a time devoted to confronting and remedying the racist past. The South has focused a lot of attention on this problem - and I defy anyone to now plausibly claim that the South continues to be more racist by ANY measure than the rest of the US - or even the UK, for that matter. It’s a bit like the way Germany has become one of the safer places to be a Jew in modern times. There are PLENTY of places in the world where anti-Semitism remains a problem - even to the degree that there is physical danger for Jews travelling there - but Germany just isn’t one of them, and the reason it isn’t one of them is because there is real guilt in Germany over what happened in the 1940s and real commitment to seeing that it doesn’t happen again. That isn’t to say that there aren’t German anti-Semites. Certainly there doesn’t seem to be any trouble getting them on TV. But German culture itself has been struggling with its anti-Semitism quite openly since the late 50s, and succeeding. The South is like that too. It isn’t that it’s hard to find Southern racists - it’s just that it’s not noticeably easier than finding them anywhere else. Stigmatizing “rednecks” as especially racist is, more often than not, merely cover for people from other cultures who don’t like to look the racism in their own towns straight in the eye.

Indeed, I don’t mind saying that something like that is probably what’s going on with Mr. Roberts. Check this bit out:

I don’t mean to say the acting is bad, mind. Several characters are played by actors who can really act. Lafayette the short-order cook (Nelsan Ellis) and the chip-on-shoulder Police Detective Andy Lefleur (played by bobble-faced Chris Bauer, who ran the docker’s union in season two of the incomparable The Wire) are both excellent. As Tara (Sookie’s best friend), Rutina Wesley also does good work, although she is much much too beautiful for the part. She needs, according to the logic of the narrative, to be a regular girl, and to fit neatly into the background spread of players surrounding Sookie; instead of which every scene in which she appears naturally to arrange itself around her, in the way that inevitably happens with unusually beautiful people. Adina Porter makes the best fist she can of the role of Tara’s mother, a part that feels like it was written in about 1924—drunk black woman who rolls her eyes and talks about Jaysus and who has her alcoholism cured by a weird voodoo ceremony that casts out the demon of drink within her. That she retains some pathos, and even believability, as a character says a lot about Porter’s actorly chops.

In other words, 3 of the 4 actors he likes on the show are also the only black ones. Which may just be how the chips fell, for all I know - except that I saw this show too and I can’t really agree here. Nelsan Ellis as Lafayette - sure. That was a standout performance. But Rutina Wesley? Really? Her accent is HORRIBLE - and while it’s true she’s pretty, is she really “unnaturally beautiful?” Anyway - he’s got the point about her being the center of attention wrong too. Tara’s character is most certainly NOT meant to fade into the background. She’s meant to be the kind of person that every scene “naturally wraps itself around” NOT because she’s “unnaturally beautiful,” but rather because she’s an attention-whoring loudmouth. Tara has a massive amount of anger inside (suggested to be supernatural, in fact) and tends to respond disproportionately to any perceived slight. Such people have a way of ending up in the center of things no matter how beautiful they’re not. Finally, I’m not sure which Adina Porter he saw, but the one I saw looked just like the part that feels like it was written in 1924. The character was such a walking stereotype it was painful to watch, and nothing that I saw from this particular actress made it anything other than what it was written to be. I dunno - maybe Mr. Roberts saw something I didn’t - but it sounds more to me like the black actors aren’t held to the same standards - typical of someone fighting racist demons of his own.

But alright - that’s all ad hominem - what of the actual case? Sorry, but I didn’t see any evidence that True Blood was trying to deal with the race issue. If anything, it’s doing just the opposite - baiting people like Mr. Roberts into saying exactly the things he says, but meaning something quite different. The scene where Tara plays the race card to get Jason out of jail was just playing the race card. In the scene with the rednecks who order their burger “hold the AIDS,” they’re not “pointedly” avoiding the race issue - it only seems that way to Mr. Roberts because of his preconceptions about how rednecks should behave. Tara turns down a pass at an all-black party and then turns around and propositions her white manager - clearly showing no hangups about interracial dating (nor, for that matter, does the white manager). Bill’s overreaction to the cop pulling him over is just that - an overreaction - and it even seems out of character as it happens. Failure to dramatize any racial tension therefore seems more like a deliberate choice than an oversight. The authors (”pointedly,” one might say) have no shortage of opportunities to dramatize it - if they meant to do so they surely would’ve gotten around to it. There’s only so lazy even lazy writers can plausibly be!

Other parts of Mr. Roberts’ essay I rather liked. For example - the fact that Bill falls so completely for Sookie IS a bit hard to believe. He’s an order of magnitude older, and there’s just nothing particularly special about Sookie that I can see either. Certainly Anna Paquin’s performance doesn’t help me see it - another point Mr. Roberts gets right. And he accurately characterizes Sookie’s problem as that she ” confuses annoyingness and occasional snarkiness for assertiveness and independence.” The dialogue is indeed “expanded polystyrene” for the most part (with occasional flashes of brilliance the exception that proves the rule).

Unfortunately, none of this makes up for missing the main theme - which he does. And how does an otherwise insightful essay get the main theme so thoroughly wrong? I can only think, for the reasons I’ve outlined, that it’s because he’s thinking with his stereotypes and letting that get in the way of what’s before him on the screen. If anything good comes out of True Blood - let’s hope its that people such as Mr. Roberts come to realize that they’ve been baited on the race issue where the South is concerned, and that the reason they are baited so easily is because of bigotry of their own toward southerners. The “New” in “New South” is more than a tourist ad.