Murder Most Boring

Hannibal

This show is a horror-fest.  Good stories involve the battle of darkness and light; good and evil.  Hannibal seems to say that there is only evil; or perhaps degrees of evil.  That there are only prey animals and predators.  That goodness and mercy are mere artifacts of the cortex which developed around the lizard brain.  It contains a celebration of intellect without soul.  Is this a reflection of our 21^st century world? 

The purported hero, Will Graham, is deeply invested in a dance of death with Hannibal Lecter.  He begins as a fragile weapon being used by the FBI to hunt serial killers.  He lives a solitary life, and loves his dogs.  Broken by his job, horrified by his own ability to see life as a serial killer sees it, he is exploited past the breaking point and thereafter tormented and manipulated by both his FBI handler and Hannibal.

There are almost no normal people in this show.  All epitomize victim or victimizer.  The pace is glacial.  The relationship between Hannibal and Will is almost overtly homoerotic.  The chess game between them involves who will live and who will die. 

The special effects and the music are expertly done; beautiful.  The actors are veterans who are excellent at their jobs.  The gore and violence are enough to satisfy the most bloodthirsty teenaged boy.  The serial killers who comprise most of the murder victims are satisfyingly evil and "deserve” to die. 

My main issue with this show is that it seems to see itself as an art film with everything but the subtitles.  Will Graham has become Hamlet.  He should either walk away or kill Hannibal.  He has been tormented by him enough that no jury would convict him, given the whole story.  That he is determined to match wits with Hannibal and bring  him to justice, or perhaps make Hannibal kill himself has become boring in the extreme. 

The only hope I have is that after all this time Will seems to have convinced Hannibal to reveal himself to the FBI agent.  And  yet, I am so fatigued by all the weirdness that I may never find out.  This is Twin Peaks with cannibalism but without the humor.  I really like Hugh Dancy (Will) but even he may not be enough to bring me back.

Missing the Mark

I have been following a few of the newer series as they come up and thinking about their appeal.  I am aware that the desired demographic of most series at this point includes an appreciation for sex, violence and blowing stuff up.  In fact, I was raised on war movies which were pretty violent, though usually without the sex.  And one of my favorite films of all time is Platoon. So it is isn’t that I dislike any of the above things per se.  The problem I am having is that somehow the storytelling is being sacrificed to mere sex, violence, and blowing stuff up; the more graphic and appalling they are, the better.

Some shows have succeeded in presenting at least one character with whom we can identify, or for whom we can cheer.  Too many of the newer ones have failed in that regard.

I have tried to watch Salem, for example.  I have no problem with throwing out the history and making witches real.  The irritating thing is that there is so much hatred of women in the writing that I can’t find a woman to root for, and most of the men are boring and/or despicable. 

I kept hoping that one of these powerful witches would pull out all the stops and just blast someone to smithereens, or that one of those who so hated and feared these women would just start killing them outright, without the pretense of religion. Not worthy of me as a nun, I suppose, but my Dad was a Marine.  I can appreciate decisive action.  If, on the other hand, they were trying to be complex and subtle, I totally missed the subtext.

The show somehow falls perilously close to satire, as if making fun of fear of powerful women, while reinforcing it at the same time.  It is excruciating to see fine actors and glorious production values wasted in this manner.  I have seen many of these same actors in other shows, and they are quite good.  They seem to be struggling to present an ensemble show, which is a plus.  But even the one who seems to be meant to be the hero, John Alden, a good actor in Nikita, fails to engage my interest.

I found myself thinking that it’s as if someone decided to take Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and satirize it.  (Which creates a real cognitive dissonance when you remember that it was a political response to McCarthyism.)  Then just to add originality, they decided to make the witches real, show off some cool special effects and throw in the elements of a teen angst drama played by adults.  Adults can’t really pull that off. 

I don’t have ADHD, but after two episodes I was becoming increasingly curious about a book or two I am in the middle of, and just plain bored with Salem’s not-quite tragic leading lady, et al.  I hope the show finds its footing, but I believe I will not be watching. 

Believe

This is a new series, of which I have seen the first couple of episodes.  Someone asked me to review this one, so here goes….

The premise of this show is familiar … almost identical to Firestarter, it concerns a little girl named Bo (Johnny Sequoyah) with special powers who is being hunted by a ruthless man who will exploit her for nefarious purposes if he catches her.  She is on the run with a man who was broken out of death row in prison for the sole purpose of protecting her. 

You can probably guess who the man is.  Yep, her long lost father.  There is a group helping them evade capture, evidently well acquainted with the evil man who hunts her.  There are some good actors here, some familiar faces: Kyle MacLachlan o f Twin Peaks fame and Delroy Lindo, The Chicago Code.

I think it remains to be seen how good this show will be, though producer J.J. Abrams has an excellent track record for success.  While the girl’s special powers help them and those they meet along the way, the evil group seems to have nearly supernatural access to total surveillance in finding them.  It’s hard not to wonder why they don’t disappear into a national wilderness, but that would be a different story I guess. 

All really good fiction is about the battle between good and evil.  The characters here are clearly delineated as being on one side or the other, with Tate (Bo’s dad) being the redeemable rogue.  The danger is going to be making them all clichés of the genre, with one-note personalities.  I hope that Bo has some brattiness and that the main bad guy isn’t just the Brain half of Pinky and the Brain (“What will we do tonight?  Same thing we always do; take over the world.”)

The up side is that this is not a teen angst drama!  Adults might actually come to enjoy it.  So, I will continue to watch this one to see how it goes.

A Teen Drama Too Far?

I confess.  I love movies and television.  I love  theater arts.  I love science fiction.  When science fiction and television intersect, I am interested.  I loved Star Trek. I became addicted to the new Battlestar Galactica.  Mind you, the lead characters had mostly seen their majority.

I even grew to like the odd Vampire Diaries, largely because of the eye candy.  That, however, is not science fiction, but fantasy.  It  is teen drama, though.

Which brings me to the new show, The 100.  The premise is interesting enough:  Life on earth died out due to radiation and pollution.  The survivors are the inhabitants of orbital stations.  Now, though, the stations are old and dying, with no way to repair them.  The question is, has the earth recovered enough to support human life?

How to find out?  Why, send 100 teenagers, of course!  Most of them are criminals, so small loss, right?  Naturally, in keeping with the trend of teen dramas, there must be a female lead to root for, preferably beautiful and smart and brave.  (Yes, Mary Sue.)  There is an obligatory hunky love interest, a less hunky but truly heroic second banana, and assorted bad guys and girls.  In orbit are the adults, some attractive, all predictable and perhaps deliberately boring.  All of whom should be shot for not investigating earth’s habitability themselves instead of sending children.

There seem to be some mutated creatures who have survived on earth and are dangerous to provide jeopardy, aside from that provided by the lawlessness that is a group of unsupervised, mostly uncivilized teens. 

There is enough here to suggest I am not going to like it, science fiction or not.  But hey, Cosmos only takes up so much time, so I gave it a try.  Two tries.  I fell asleep both times. 

Now I am 65 years old and my favorite science fiction writers are predictably Asimov and Ellison and that lot.  But I loved the old Podkayne of Mars, a teen drama I have yet to see done properly.  And yet this lot leaves me so uninterested in the future of the species as to fall asleep mid-jeopardy.  The show seems to have some mildly talented actors and very nice production values, but seriously?  What is so bloody hard about creating characters one can care about.  Yes, they have to be a bit deeper than epithelial cells, but a little thought could handle that. 

The potential here is distressing to think about.  What could have been done with some believable characters…or even a believable reason for sending the kids down – a final sacrifice to try to save them, for example.  What about starting from the point of view of the survivors, instead of with the orbital invaders?  There is a load of conflict; it’s just impossible for me to care about the characters…they are not engaging or mildly interesting. I had a ministry with young people for many years…they are simply deeper than this.

Maybe I am just too old.  And maybe television is just too dumb.