February 10, 2011
The Sin in the Sisterhood
The most recent episode of Bones ("The Sin in the Sisterhood") features a plot taken straight out of Brady Udall's The Lonely Polygamist: Fundamentalist Mormon with three wives has an affair and ends up dead (okay, not that last part). Booth and Brennan also go out of their way to distinguish between polygamous Mormons and the mainline church. The handful of Mormon-specific references are used correctly.
This is the second time Bones has used "Mormon" material, which leads me to believe they've got a Mormon writer, or are plugged into a realiable Mormon source. Okay, it only affects a tiny fraction of the audience, but that tiny fraction of the audience appreciates a serious attempt at verisimilitude. Though it may be invisible to everybody else, any kind of writing is improved by getting the little details right(er).
Like the old "Engineer and the Guillotine" joke, when encountering bad anti-Mormon material (whiny, repetitiously dull, making arguments no actual Mormon cares two figs about), I'm often seized by the desire to volunteer to write them some good anti-Mormon material.
This is the second time Bones has used "Mormon" material, which leads me to believe they've got a Mormon writer, or are plugged into a realiable Mormon source. Okay, it only affects a tiny fraction of the audience, but that tiny fraction of the audience appreciates a serious attempt at verisimilitude. Though it may be invisible to everybody else, any kind of writing is improved by getting the little details right(er).
Like the old "Engineer and the Guillotine" joke, when encountering bad anti-Mormon material (whiny, repetitiously dull, making arguments no actual Mormon cares two figs about), I'm often seized by the desire to volunteer to write them some good anti-Mormon material.
Labels: bones, lds, religion, television
January 24, 2011
The conservative hero
Kate commented a while back (also here) about what makes a good hero:
I'd like to add one more to the list:
Now, I don't mean in the "votes Republican" sense, though as with Michael J. Fox's Alex B. Keaton and William Shatner's Denny Crane, that can work in the hands of a talented actor, even if he's a liberal at heart. I mean in the William F. Buckley sense:
The hero knows there are things in life—from the past as well as the present—worth conserving: institutions and relationships, beliefs and traditions, manners and protocols, the way things are simply done. And these do not easily yield to fashion, trends, or political correctness.
The reason that cops, lawyers and forensic scientists populate television dramas is that these professions are inherently conservative. They have traditions and procedures, the scientific method and the rule of law. And following them can at times put the hero at odds with his ideals.
But violating them will definitely get him into trouble with society, the people who sign his paycheck, and his conscience.
For all his free-wheeling ways, House is a tenacious—even fanatical—empiricist. Every cause has a discernible effect. All consequences can be traced back to a set of precipitating actions. "After eliminating the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, is the truth."
And no matter how grudgingly, he goes through channels, even if he has to lie and cheat to do so. He can only do the work he wants to do in the institutional setting of a hospital. Rock, meet hard place. But as Kate puts it, "It actually is harder to color inside the lines." Conflict!
Captain Picard always seems to me to be bucking for a job as U.N. Secretary General. But he does have a irrational devotion to the Prime Directive. Lo and behold, conflict! Though I wish the writers would have made Picard pay a much bigger personal price for this devotion.
Finally in First Contact, Patrick Stewart showed that with the right material he could chew through the scenery like the good Captain Ahab he should have been all along.
No man is a machine. The educated mind wars with mindless instinct. Freedom battles with the rule of law, improvisation with by-the-book, the truth versus the facts, what is legal versus what is right. Perhaps this tension is best summed up by FBI Special Agent Seeley Booth:
Consider the Stargate episode where the team encounters a Guns of the South situation (in which apartheid-era South Africans travel back in time to arm the Confederacy with 20th century weapons). Except in this case SG-1 runs into them during one of their expeditions.
At first, arguing that sure, they're SOBs, but their our SOBs, Colonel O'Neill insists that the needs of Earth outweigh the moral compromise (the ends justify the means). This creates conflict with Carter and the politically-correct Daniel Jackson, who take the high ground.
O'Neill comes around in the end (there really isn't any doubt). But if O'Neill's initial position isn't convincing made, and Richard Dean Anderson couldn't deliver it in a convincing manner, the drama would have ended up as a mush of shallow moralizing with strawman opponents.
Writers can't fall back on the institutional conservatism and forget that the hero has to internalize these values to a certain extent in order to survive (or become a functioning sociopath, which gives us Dexter).
One reason I think Emily Deschanel and David Boreanaz are given producer credits on Bones (besides revenue sharing) is so they can defend their characters from writers who would try to turn them into conventional liberals who, you know, think the same way hip Hollywood writers think.
It's the "I don't know anybody who voted for Nixon" syndrome (when Nixon won by a landslide). At least this is my explanation for those awful, politically correct scripts that pop up every now and then on NCIS.
But NCIS remains the most popular one-hour drama on television precisely because it gets one thing exactly right: Leroy Jethro Gibbs as the personification of Semper Fi conservatism.
Even a well-defined supporting character can help stave off these pressures. For example, Linda Hunt as Hetty Lange on NCIS: Los Angeles alone makes the series watchable, as an aging cold warrior adapting to modern times but not leaving the past behind.
Danno on the new Hawaii Five-0 is cast as an old school, Miranda-respecting cop there to steady McGarrett's loose cannon (though that looseness is losing me). The original CSI still has one great ace up its sleeve: Paul Guilfoyle as Captain Brass, a gruff, misanthropic, by-the-numbers cop.
Rex Linn fills a similar role CSI: Miami as Sergeant Frank Tripp, but not quite. For some reason—maybe they didn't want him harshing Horatio's mellow—Tripp is Horatio's subordinate. Thus the institutional check is lost. And so it's pretty much all id all the time.
Even if nobody can be too rich or too thin or too underdressed in the Hollywood version of reality—your protagonist can be way too cool to be believable.
As Margaret Thatcher said, "The facts of life are conservative." A hero—even in the most fantastic of fantasy lands—must be a stubborn realist about life and human nature.
1. The hero is confident in a nonchalant way.
2. The hero has a sense of humor.
3. The hero respects women without putting them on pedestals.
4. The hero know himself.
5. The hero is loyal and [can be counted on to] stick around.
I'd like to add one more to the list:
6. The hero is a conservative.
Now, I don't mean in the "votes Republican" sense, though as with Michael J. Fox's Alex B. Keaton and William Shatner's Denny Crane, that can work in the hands of a talented actor, even if he's a liberal at heart. I mean in the William F. Buckley sense:
A conservative is the fellow standing athwart history yelling "Stop!"
The hero knows there are things in life—from the past as well as the present—worth conserving: institutions and relationships, beliefs and traditions, manners and protocols, the way things are simply done. And these do not easily yield to fashion, trends, or political correctness.
The reason that cops, lawyers and forensic scientists populate television dramas is that these professions are inherently conservative. They have traditions and procedures, the scientific method and the rule of law. And following them can at times put the hero at odds with his ideals.
But violating them will definitely get him into trouble with society, the people who sign his paycheck, and his conscience.
For all his free-wheeling ways, House is a tenacious—even fanatical—empiricist. Every cause has a discernible effect. All consequences can be traced back to a set of precipitating actions. "After eliminating the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, is the truth."
And no matter how grudgingly, he goes through channels, even if he has to lie and cheat to do so. He can only do the work he wants to do in the institutional setting of a hospital. Rock, meet hard place. But as Kate puts it, "It actually is harder to color inside the lines." Conflict!
Captain Picard always seems to me to be bucking for a job as U.N. Secretary General. But he does have a irrational devotion to the Prime Directive. Lo and behold, conflict! Though I wish the writers would have made Picard pay a much bigger personal price for this devotion.
Finally in First Contact, Patrick Stewart showed that with the right material he could chew through the scenery like the good Captain Ahab he should have been all along.
No man is a machine. The educated mind wars with mindless instinct. Freedom battles with the rule of law, improvisation with by-the-book, the truth versus the facts, what is legal versus what is right. Perhaps this tension is best summed up by FBI Special Agent Seeley Booth:
I love this country, you know, but I'll tell you something. If I was working law enforcement back in the day when they threw all that tea in the harbor, I would have rounded everybody up and we'd all still be English.
Consider the Stargate episode where the team encounters a Guns of the South situation (in which apartheid-era South Africans travel back in time to arm the Confederacy with 20th century weapons). Except in this case SG-1 runs into them during one of their expeditions.
At first, arguing that sure, they're SOBs, but their our SOBs, Colonel O'Neill insists that the needs of Earth outweigh the moral compromise (the ends justify the means). This creates conflict with Carter and the politically-correct Daniel Jackson, who take the high ground.
O'Neill comes around in the end (there really isn't any doubt). But if O'Neill's initial position isn't convincing made, and Richard Dean Anderson couldn't deliver it in a convincing manner, the drama would have ended up as a mush of shallow moralizing with strawman opponents.
Writers can't fall back on the institutional conservatism and forget that the hero has to internalize these values to a certain extent in order to survive (or become a functioning sociopath, which gives us Dexter).
One reason I think Emily Deschanel and David Boreanaz are given producer credits on Bones (besides revenue sharing) is so they can defend their characters from writers who would try to turn them into conventional liberals who, you know, think the same way hip Hollywood writers think.
It's the "I don't know anybody who voted for Nixon" syndrome (when Nixon won by a landslide). At least this is my explanation for those awful, politically correct scripts that pop up every now and then on NCIS.
But NCIS remains the most popular one-hour drama on television precisely because it gets one thing exactly right: Leroy Jethro Gibbs as the personification of Semper Fi conservatism.
Even a well-defined supporting character can help stave off these pressures. For example, Linda Hunt as Hetty Lange on NCIS: Los Angeles alone makes the series watchable, as an aging cold warrior adapting to modern times but not leaving the past behind.
Danno on the new Hawaii Five-0 is cast as an old school, Miranda-respecting cop there to steady McGarrett's loose cannon (though that looseness is losing me). The original CSI still has one great ace up its sleeve: Paul Guilfoyle as Captain Brass, a gruff, misanthropic, by-the-numbers cop.
Rex Linn fills a similar role CSI: Miami as Sergeant Frank Tripp, but not quite. For some reason—maybe they didn't want him harshing Horatio's mellow—Tripp is Horatio's subordinate. Thus the institutional check is lost. And so it's pretty much all id all the time.
Even if nobody can be too rich or too thin or too underdressed in the Hollywood version of reality—your protagonist can be way too cool to be believable.
As Margaret Thatcher said, "The facts of life are conservative." A hero—even in the most fantastic of fantasy lands—must be a stubborn realist about life and human nature.
Related posts
Angsty angst ruins everything
Writing to be read
Good books don't have to be hard
Dramatic conservation
Labels: bones, kate, mckee, television, thinking about writing
November 29, 2010
Lying to The Mentalist
I've warmed to Lie to Me as I've cooled to The Mentalist. It took a season of Lie to Me for Tim Roth to figure out his character, for the writers to figure out Tim Roth, and to whittle down the cast and decide what they're doing there. But the improvements have been for the better, and the show's gotten smarter as a result.
A ongoing drama series needs a good thesis statement. On House it's "Everybody lies." On Lie to Me it's "But their body language tells the truth." The clearer the thesis statement, the easier it is for writers to produce good scripts. Unfortunately, the opposite is just as true. The thesis statement for The Mentalist?
Maybe someting like, "All the world's a stage." But the argument is never made or countered. There's no conflict where the conflict ought to be focused.
This made the premise predictable and the casting confused. But Simon Baker fits the part so well I've been willing to give it a pass, just as I stuck with CSI: Miami longer than it deserved to watch David Caruso do his excellent B-movie noir thing. After a while, though, the sum of the parts leaves a rancid aftertaste that's hard to stomach.
There is a point where, no matter how talented, the lead can no longer carry a show past its flaws.
The first and worst narrative mistake in The Mentalist is the diabolical mastermind plot device. The Dark Knight was ruined by it, and Sherlock Holmes and Iron Man II were made lesser movies by it. It's a disease of modern storytelling that makes the villains in hoary old James Bond flicks look good by comparison.
Hey, Hollywood writers, stop trying to remake The X-Files and Silence of the Lambs! You're not smart enough! As a result, the antagonists aren't smart. Everybody else is dumb. Coming up with two dozen strokes of brilliance a year is impossible. The decline of The Mentalist is typical: start smart, grow progressively lamer.
Too many "mind games" consist of little more than baldly entrapping a suspect who behaves more like a badly-programmed automaton.
The inherent advantage of science and medical shows like Bones and House is that there's a lot more knowledge in the world than there are geniuses. Lacking brain power, unbelievable luck becomes a substitute for intelligence, like Lister's "good luck virus" in Red Dwarf. Deus ex machina powers at the fingertips.
My advice is to stick to ordinary crimes solved in interesting ways. When CSI: Las Vegas goes back to the basics--revealing the mundane demons of human nature through empiricism and flashes of insight--is when it gets good again.
The Mentalist also makes the same mistake that Dutcher made in Brigham City. To create an "interesting" protagonist, he placed the character arc behind him. True, too much character arc turns a show into a soap, which is just as bad.
But knowing that down in his psyche resides a core of ordinariness makes a quirky protagonist come alive. Now, as Kate argues, a character can have a static arc that never progresses. Except we can easily imagine Columbo, for example, going home at the end of the episode. Even superheroes have the dry cleaning to pick up.
That's not true of Patrick Jane. Not only does he have no arc, he evaporates after the closing credits. Based on what the viewer is presented with, his life is mind-numbingly dull and pointless.
Better casting could compensate, but Kang's Cho is the only character who has mental chemistry with Jane, a kind of left-brained Spock to Jane's right-brained Spock. Otherwise, this Spock has no McCoy. He's a House without a Foreman and a Wilson. Sherlock Holmes rises to his best when Watson really challenges him.
Cho is also the only law enforcement officer who belongs in a so-called "CBI."
I expect shows about ostensibly competent professionals to feature them doing things competently and professionally. What's the rest of the CBI staff doing there? CSI: Miami jumped the shark for me when it resorted to moronic malfeasance to gin up drama. The Mentalist has skirted out-and-out incompetence so far, but only barely.
Okay, they hung a lampshade on the Rigsby/Van Pelt romance from the start, maybe to get it out of the way. But professional it isn't. Sadly stereotypical it was. This season especially, Robin Tunney does nothing for me. She's phoning in a Dr. Cutty routine. Aunjanue Ellis (Hightower) outshines her when they're on screen together.
Besides, what does Lisbon actually do other than scold? A smart stroke of casting on Bones was Tamara Taylor as Cam, a superior Brennan has to report to, and a competent medical examiner in her own right (though they have a bad habit of making her play dumb when Booth isn't around so the other squints can explain stuff to her, meaning us).
I'm cottoning to the idea that Jane is the diabolical mastermind, a more sociopathic Dexter (talk about your unreliable narrators!). But that's definitely not prime time material. So the nihilism at the heart of the show sits there, growing stale even as it drags down the drama like an old boat anchor.
A few seasons ago, Bones wandered down the diabolical mastermind path and nearly wrecked the show. The next season they pared down the cast, reaffirmed the premise, and got things back on course. It could be done with The Mentalist too, and pretty easily. But that thesis needs articulating.
Related posts
The Big Bad
Superbad is superboring
Labels: bones, kate, superhero, television reviews
December 14, 2009
Star Trek
J.J. Abrams's reboot of Star Trek (2009) is a non-stop pastiche of eye-rolling hand-waves, each one more unbelievable than the last. A compilation of cliffhangers straight out of B-movie serial land. A script that makes Star Wars looks Shakespearean by comparison.And yet the sum of the parts of this two-hour cinematic train wreck--the scattered pieces recycled from (exactly) thirty years of theatrical releases--is the most enjoyable Trek in two decades, worthy of being considered in the same canonical company as II, IV and VI.
Abrams's snappy pacing deserves a lot of credit, never dawdling long enough for the sheer absurdity of a scene to sink in. But the lion's share goes to the pitch-perfect casting and well-designed sets the actors appear at home in. Chris Pine as Kirk settles into that captain's chair like he owns it.
Zachary Quinto as young Spock achieves what Jim Parsons does as Sheldon on Big Bang Theory (albeit as a dramatic character), capturing the mien of a man who lives too much in his own head, but doesn't begrudge yielding the spotlight to a driven extrovert who lives too much outside his own head.
I wouldn't have expected the Spock/Uhura relationship to work, but it does. There's a lot of dramatic potential here if they don't mawkishly mess it up.
The other backstories ring true too. McCoy running away from a bad marriage (and implying that he comes from old money). Scotty as an eccentric scientist who's found a himself a great new toy. When Chekov jumps up and excitedly declares, "I can do this!" I bought the emotion completely.
Even the gimmick of Nimoy's cameo works, Nimoy having achieved the kind of on-screen gravitas usually reserved for bearded British actors. I hope they find an excuse to use him again.
Only one thing worries me. In the (hoped-for) sequels, Abrams must come up with stories that do not involve the end of life as we know it. I couldn't helping thinking of The Jerk, where the sniper keeps missing Steve Martin and hitting cans on the store shelves, and Martin yells, "He hates cans!"
Star Trek villains really hate solar systems. Destroying stars and sundry planetary objects in order to get even with somebody--it's time to retire this plot device permanently. Time travel too. We've been there and done that and done that enough times for several lifetimes already.
The real attraction of police procedurals like Bones (which is really Star Trek: Booth as Kirk, Brennan as Spock, Saroyan as McCoy) is watching a competent team working together to get something important done. Star Trek needs to get back to that: bigger team, smaller problems.
Related posts
Stupid on Star Trek stilts (1)
Stupid on Star Trek stilts (2)
Stupid on Star Trek" stilts (3)
The brave old world of Star Trek
Labels: bones, movie reviews, star trek
December 11, 2009
Translated correctly
Speaking of Mormon literary references, in Mormon theological terminology, "to be translated" means to be resurrected without dying first.
A similar pop culture expression (I'm serious) is "to twinkle."
On an episode of Bones earlier this year ("Double Death of the Dearly Departed"), that takes place at a funeral home, Agent Booth decides that talking openly about the investigation would be rude. So instead of saying the victim was "murdered," they will say he was "translated."
Okay, opposite meaning, but the usage is otherwise spot on. They keep this gag going for the whole show. It's so funny from a Mormon perspective that I have to believe a Mormon dreamed it up.
And [Enoch] saw the Lord, and he walked with him, and was before his face continually; and he walked with God three hundred and sixty-five years, making him four hundred and thirty years old when he was translated (D&C 107:49).
A similar pop culture expression (I'm serious) is "to twinkle."
And ye shall never endure the pains of death; but when I shall come in my glory ye shall be changed in the twinkling of an eye from mortality to immortality; and then shall ye be blessed in the kingdom of my Father (3 Nephi 28:8).
On an episode of Bones earlier this year ("Double Death of the Dearly Departed"), that takes place at a funeral home, Agent Booth decides that talking openly about the investigation would be rude. So instead of saying the victim was "murdered," they will say he was "translated."
Angela Montenegro: Hey, you stole the body?
Agent Booth: No. No. No. No. We didn't steal it, you see? We borrowed it. Okay? Cam and Bones think it was translated.
Angela Montenegro: Uh, what?
Agent Booth: Translated. It's code for murder. That's how we're saying it today. Translated.
Okay, opposite meaning, but the usage is otherwise spot on. They keep this gag going for the whole show. It's so funny from a Mormon perspective that I have to believe a Mormon dreamed it up.
Labels: bones, language, lds, religion, television