June 10, 2013
Fixing "Granite Flats"
Continuing my ongoing rant from the last two weeks, the sad thing about Granite Flats is that the great idea at the core of the show could have been easily fixed in the scripting stage:
The story aside, I will say that Granite Flats is visually watchable. Digital cameras and editing suits have matured to the point that a competent cinematographer (Reed Smoot) can produce video indistinguishable from the standard Hollywood product.
The sets are good, the anachronisms not terribly distracting, the acting tolerable, though at times the actors communicate the opposite of what the script surely intended. But I blame that mostly on the lack of a competent and invested showrunner.
Meaning an producer with ultimate creative control of, and responsibility for, the story.
Granite Flats is the sum of bunch of parts. What makes Hollywood so good at consistently cranking out hundreds of scripted shows every season is a pool of showrunners who know how to knit the individual parts together into a cohesive narrative.
Oh, most of them I can't stand watching, but because of the substance of the stories, and less the structure of the stories themselves.
The substance was there to make Granite Flats great. Now with their first "scripted" show in the can, hopefully BYU-TV can stop patting themselves on the back long enough to realize how badly they screwed up the fundamentals of dramatic moral storytelling.
And get it right next time.
• Don't muddle up the plot lines. The kids want to find the UFO; Chief Sanders wants to exonerate Jenkins. Period.
• Bring the JAG lawyer in from the start. Sure, make him young and inexperienced, but competent and eager. Learning that Sanders thinks Jenkins is innocent, he ropes in Sanders and charges ahead.
• If the FBI guys really want to do everything on the sly, they can watch from a distance as the kids collect the pieces of the UFO for their school project. Because who would suspect a bunch of kids?
• Make the pastor a retired army chaplain who figures out pretty quick what kind of mental state Jenkins is coming from and helps Sanders and the lawyer dig up what really happened in Korea.
• They learn that Frank was at the scene of the motor pool explosion and have to get him detoxed from his Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test so he can remember what he saw and did.
• Climax with a John Woo-style standoff when Chief Sanders and the FBI guys show up at the kids' clubhouse at the same time. That's when Sanders sees the scale model and everything clicks.
The story aside, I will say that Granite Flats is visually watchable. Digital cameras and editing suits have matured to the point that a competent cinematographer (Reed Smoot) can produce video indistinguishable from the standard Hollywood product.
The sets are good, the anachronisms not terribly distracting, the acting tolerable, though at times the actors communicate the opposite of what the script surely intended. But I blame that mostly on the lack of a competent and invested showrunner.
Meaning an producer with ultimate creative control of, and responsibility for, the story.
Granite Flats is the sum of bunch of parts. What makes Hollywood so good at consistently cranking out hundreds of scripted shows every season is a pool of showrunners who know how to knit the individual parts together into a cohesive narrative.
Oh, most of them I can't stand watching, but because of the substance of the stories, and less the structure of the stories themselves.
The substance was there to make Granite Flats great. Now with their first "scripted" show in the can, hopefully BYU-TV can stop patting themselves on the back long enough to realize how badly they screwed up the fundamentals of dramatic moral storytelling.
And get it right next time.
Related posts
Granite Flats
The negative aesthetic
Labels: granite flats, television reviews, thinking about writing
June 03, 2013
The negative aesthetic
As Eric Samuelsen observes in his review, Granite Flats seems
One reason Granite Flats is a period piece set in the early 1960s, we're told in the "making of" segment, is because back then there wasn't all that nasty sex and swearing. But having donned heavy-duty blinders to shield us from such social misdemeanors, they left the barn doors wide open for a herd of felonies to stampede down Main Street.
There is a wholesome story buried in Granite Flats, about inventive kids working together to solve a puzzle using science and brain power.
But instead we're shown (repeatedly) that small town America is full of drunks, jerks, bullies, and thieves, everybody lies, the FBI can steal stuff from you without a warrant, the military can't be trusted (and certainly not when it comes to criminal due process), and the CIA wants to fry your brain. Not exactly "seeing the good in the world."
Even when it comes to "traditional family values," Granite Flats turns into a weird outlier.
Police Chief John Sanders is the only principal character with a "traditional" family. Arthur's dad is dead. Wallace's mother either divorced his dad or ran off (or both). Madeline's wackadoodle parents (a 1960's version of Sheldon and Amy from Big Bang Theory) both work and let her do whatever she wants so as not to "stifle her creativity."
These two characters could have been a lot of fun, but Madeline's parents present the same moral conundrum as the incompetent JAG lawyer previously mentioned: as hard as they are to take seriously, it's more difficult to see the point of the humor. Because in-between the sit-com moments, they engage in pointedly unethical behavior.
To give him credit, the pastor only lies once. Or twice. He's just ineffectual. He isn't married either, and I'd swear that in every scene with Beth, he's two seconds away from hitting on her.
I don't doubt that, aside from Jay Leno, Clint Eastwood, Roger L. Simon and a few others, Hollywood is a hotbed of knee-jerk liberalism. But the left-leaning plots you see on the screen are, more often than not, less a reflection of political bias than the need to feed television's insatiable story machine.
Putting "traditional values" under stress and holding them up for ridicule is the quickest, easiest (and the laziest) way to generate conflict and drama.
If BYU-TV can't script eight hours of television without resorting to malevolent government conspiracies, broken families, and milquetoast religious figures, how do they expect anybody outside the reddest state in the country to do so?
When they set out to make Granite Flats, BYU-TV clearly got caught up in the effect they'd imagined it'd have, how it was going to be Touched by an Angel redux, and didn't bother to nail down the script. Busy counting their eggs before they hatched, they forgot to turn on the incubator.
That rotten smell is the result.
defined by what's essentially a negative aesthetic. By insisting on creating an entertainment that doesn't have certain elements, they haven't really defined what they want to do instead.
One reason Granite Flats is a period piece set in the early 1960s, we're told in the "making of" segment, is because back then there wasn't all that nasty sex and swearing. But having donned heavy-duty blinders to shield us from such social misdemeanors, they left the barn doors wide open for a herd of felonies to stampede down Main Street.
There is a wholesome story buried in Granite Flats, about inventive kids working together to solve a puzzle using science and brain power.
But instead we're shown (repeatedly) that small town America is full of drunks, jerks, bullies, and thieves, everybody lies, the FBI can steal stuff from you without a warrant, the military can't be trusted (and certainly not when it comes to criminal due process), and the CIA wants to fry your brain. Not exactly "seeing the good in the world."
Even when it comes to "traditional family values," Granite Flats turns into a weird outlier.
Police Chief John Sanders is the only principal character with a "traditional" family. Arthur's dad is dead. Wallace's mother either divorced his dad or ran off (or both). Madeline's wackadoodle parents (a 1960's version of Sheldon and Amy from Big Bang Theory) both work and let her do whatever she wants so as not to "stifle her creativity."
These two characters could have been a lot of fun, but Madeline's parents present the same moral conundrum as the incompetent JAG lawyer previously mentioned: as hard as they are to take seriously, it's more difficult to see the point of the humor. Because in-between the sit-com moments, they engage in pointedly unethical behavior.
To give him credit, the pastor only lies once. Or twice. He's just ineffectual. He isn't married either, and I'd swear that in every scene with Beth, he's two seconds away from hitting on her.
I don't doubt that, aside from Jay Leno, Clint Eastwood, Roger L. Simon and a few others, Hollywood is a hotbed of knee-jerk liberalism. But the left-leaning plots you see on the screen are, more often than not, less a reflection of political bias than the need to feed television's insatiable story machine.
Putting "traditional values" under stress and holding them up for ridicule is the quickest, easiest (and the laziest) way to generate conflict and drama.
If BYU-TV can't script eight hours of television without resorting to malevolent government conspiracies, broken families, and milquetoast religious figures, how do they expect anybody outside the reddest state in the country to do so?
When they set out to make Granite Flats, BYU-TV clearly got caught up in the effect they'd imagined it'd have, how it was going to be Touched by an Angel redux, and didn't bother to nail down the script. Busy counting their eggs before they hatched, they forgot to turn on the incubator.
That rotten smell is the result.
Related posts
Granite Flats
Fixing Granite Flats
Labels: granite flats, religion, television reviews
May 27, 2013
Granite Flats
BYU-TV is BYU's satellite/cable outlet. When it's not broadcasting BYU sports and Mormon-specific religious events, it tries hard to be a generic, family-values, Christian broadcaster that anybody interested in generic family values would watch.The programming includes reruns of syndicated "family-values" shows like Doc (with Billy Ray Cyrus), Wind at My Back (from Kevin Sullivan), old Disney flicks (and clones of same), and PBS-style science/nature shows.
It also creates original in-house content, some of which is surprisingly not generic and even pretty good, like American Ride, Story Trek, and Audio-Files. The latest BYU-TV production is a first, a scripted drama series called Granite Flats.
Here, though, they started with a good idea and executed it so clumsily that I couldn't stop being fascinated by the cinematic train wreck that followed.
Granite Flats is a period piece that takes place in 1962 at and around an army base in Colorado. The night Arthur and his mother arrive in town (his father, we are led to believe, was a test pilot killed at Edwards) he sees a comet [sic] falling out of the sky.
The next day at school, he's befriended by Madeline, the school's Lisa Simpson, and Timmy, the youngest son of the town's chief of police. Timmy's not a brainiac like Arthur and Madeline, but makes up for it with sheer gregariousness. The Scooby Gang is thus formed.
At this point, I was pretty sure we were in for a cross between Encyclopedia Brown and Mad Scientist Club, with a little Detective Conan thrown in for good measure. And indeed, they soon set off to track down the comet [sic] that Arthur saw.
Incidentally, that "comet" is indicative of an underlying flaw in the show. These kids understand complex trigonometry. They can build a metal detector out of spare parts. They darn well know the difference between a comet and a meteor. Alas, the writers don't.
The Scoobies are tracking it down when an explosion levels the motor pool shop on the base, killing a mechanic. Frank, a patient at the base hospital where Beth (Arthur's mom) is a nurse, rushes to help. He comes back with hands burned "turning off the gas." A clue!
That evening, in the best, most intense scene in the whole series, Sergeant Jenkins, the guy in charge of the motor pool, shows his son (Wallace) how to clean his .45 while rambling on about a firefight that wiped out his platoon in Korea and getting steadily drunk.
Wallace slips the gun off the table and is walking away with it when Chief John Sanders (well-played by Richard Gunn) and MP Major Slim Kirkpatrick arrive to question Jenkins about the day's events. Jenkins immediately confesses to blowing up the motor pool.
Jenkins's confession is good enough for Kirkpatrick but Sanders isn't convinced and wants to dig further. The kids resume their hunt for the "comet."
Meanwhile, Beth's boss skulks around the hospital like the Cigarette Smoking Man on The X-Files, involved in a top-secret conspiracy that involves Frank. And future Al-Anon member Wallace gets taken in by one of the nurses at the army hospital.
Read more »
Labels: BYU, free-range kids, granite flats, religion, television reviews