A friend of mine is watching through Battlestar: Galactica - mostly, I guess, because both his brother and I kept going on about how good the “reimagined” version is. Where the brother and I part ways is on just how bad things got around season 2.5. I think the show tanked with Epiphanies, hitting absolute bottom with Black Market and never fully recovering (I admit that Lay Down Your Burdens was up to standards, however, but that was an oasis in a desert of crap). The brother admits that things got a bit shaky in the second half of season 2, but insists that it wasn’t all that bad, and that anyway the show eventually recovered. And I think honestly a good chunk of the fun of watching the series for my friend is anticipation of which side o this divide he will end up coming down on. He’s just started into Season 2 now.
I’ve only met the brother twice, and we’ve never talked about Battlestar, so there’s no “debate” per se going on. But the friend did relay a comment his brother made that I thought was equal parts interesting and retarded. And it was basically that if I thought Season 2.5 went off the rails, he’d like to see me try to do better.
OK - so it’s ovious why this is a retarded thing to say. The people who write the show are professionals who get paid lots of money to deliver good stories within the framework of a consistent story arc. It’s their full-time job, it’s a lucrative one, and it’s a job a lot of people would kill to get besides. The idea that they get an “E for Effort” because their job also happens to be “hard” is roughly the same argument GM used in the 70s during the gas crisis about compact cars. “Yeah, we’d like to build smaller, more efficient cars, but it takes time to adjust.” And it’s an argument that worked about as long as it took Honda to open up a dealership in your neighborhood. When I buy a car, I’m less interested in how much effort the people who made it put into it than I am in whether it meets my needs. I’m the paying customer, after all - it’s not like GM is offering to give me a car. And so it is with TV shows. They’re a product too, and the relative difficulty of making them isn’t really the basis on which I decide which ones to spend my time watching. Given that my time is limited, given that - as a grad student - there is always “something better” that I could be doing besides watching TV, I try to use my valuable relaxation time to best advantage by watching shows that are good. Battlestar gets a claim on my attention only so long as I believe it is better than something else I could be watching. I don’t want to spend hours of my time going “well, this isn’t really all that entertaining, but I know the people who made it have a hard job, so I’ll sit here and stare at the screen anyway.” It’s an almost unbelievably dumb suggestion. And it’s all the more so considering that in this case I actually paid money for boxed DVD sets of shows I’d already seen on TV as they aired. I declined to purchase the Season 2.5 boxed set because - by the same principle - when I spend money on entertainment I try to spend it on entertainment that is actually entertaining. I have never in my life looked at a shelf of DVDs, tried to figure out which took the most effort to produce, and gone with that one.
That said, it’s also an interesting thing to say in the sense that I can think of few other situations where someone would want me to filter my quality rating through the lens of the difficulty of producing the product. It strikes me that I frequently hear this kind of comment in discussions about arts and entertainment, and that I have as good as never heard it anywhere else. Or, more accurately, I never hear it as an excuse anywhere else. So why do artists and creative types seem to inspire it?
Even within the entertainment industry, it’s interesting how this breaks down. Take my beloved Blakes 7. It’s a campy, poorly-produced 1970s BBC space opera with some of the worst special effects ever seen on screen. The production values are so low that I honestly can’t blame anyone who is so distracted by them he can’t enjoy the story. The interesting thing to me is that it would never occur to anyone to challenge such a person to do better. I would never say “Oh, you don’t like Blake’s production values, eh? Let’s see YOU try it, then!” When it’s special effects we’re on about, everyone seems to understand that this is a job for professionals, and that when we’re judging them we’re not making any implicit assertions that we could do better - we’re simply honestly reporting whehter the product is up to our specs - not unlike buying the car from the earlier example.
Stop a moment to marvel at the irony. It’s actually the writing, and not the production values, that make or break a program. The writing is the core, the engine. Everything else is props that help us suspend our disbelief - but no more. Other elements can break a show - by making it impossible for us to forget we’re watching something that isn’t real. But no other element can really make a show. You don’t hear people going around saying things like “Well, the writing’s terrible, the actors are average, and the stories are not that interesting, but I’m a big fan of Show X because the special effects just make it so believable!” It never happens. The best you’d get on the special effects front would be some honest admiration. I mean, a technically-minded person may watch a show to marvel at the production values, but he’d never consider himself a “fan” of that show on the basis of production alone. Production values don’t capture anyone’s imagination. Good writing and good stories do. That’s why the original Battlestar: Galactica from the 70s was so easily replaced, in fact. The special effects were great (for the time, anyway), but the writing was campy and predictable. No show stands the test of time on production values. So it’s ironic that we’re willing to make excuses for bad writing. In fact, it’s the last thing that deserves the benefit of a doubt.
That said, I think I know why - and it’s that writing isn’t capital intensive. Anyone can be a writer for the price of a second-rate laptop. It’s the kind of thing that bored teenagers do. Making good special effects reqires access to expensive equipment and resources and a lot of practical training whereas reading and writing are things we all learned in elementary school. Where we all understand the mechanics of writing (though few of us know how to do it well), special effects wizardry is built on trade secrets. So I think the knee-jerk defense of bad writing that people involved with scriptwriting and so on (as this brother evidently was at some point in his life) give probably stems from a certain amount of understandable insecurity about their jobs. Since pretty much everyone not only has access to the tools for writing but probably has, at some point in his life, tried his hand at it, people who are writing professionals worry that people don’t see them as professionals, don’t see them as anything out of the ordinary, really. And I’ll have to admit, I think that danger is there. If we’ve all had the experience of trying our own hand at writing, we’ve also all had the experience of having to read and be nice about the dreadful bile that one of our completely talentless aspiring writer friends gives us for an opinion. There is no shortage of people out there who can’t write at all but suffer from the delusion that they can. So yes, I think these frustrations on the part of writers are justified. There are indeed a great many people who don’t understand just how hard the task of keeping characters consistent and believable over the stretch of a series can be.
I am not one of them, however, and in any case, nothing about the general public’s lack of understanding lets professional writers off the hook for doing their jobs. If writing is a profession like any other, it should be judged like any other. We don’t make excuses for shoddy special effects, and I see no reason why we should make excuses for shoddy writing. As I said, it is the writing more than anything else that makes a show what it is. I can get around truly awful production values if it is necessary to enjoy good writing - as I regularly do when watching Blakes 7 or Doctor Who, for example. I can’t, and don’t even see the point in trying to, get around bad writing for the purpose of appreciating stellar production values. The story is everything - and if it isn’t something I can appreciate then I can’t appreciate the show.
So yes, I understand that the Battlestar writers have hard jobs. I just don’t understand why that’s meant to make them immune to criticism. TV shows (and novels and plays, etc.) are products too, and people buy them or don’t based on whether or not they meet our needs, not on whether or not we feel for the writers. If Battlestar wants to be remembered as a successful show, it needs to actually be a successful show, which is to say that it needs to deliver a better product than its competition. No one is more important to that than the writers.
