shadowkat | (no subject)

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just about tv

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Okay Heroes is improving, actually I think it's going to be quite good. Really unnerved me in a couple of places tonight. Nice and creepy in just the right spots. Although this does pose a question - why is it that every science fiction/fantasy show that appears on film or tv has to be creepy, violent or have elements of horror? Can anyone out there think of an example, that is not horror on some level? (It's not rhetorical, nor meant as a criticism, just curious.)

Am close to giving up on Brothers and Sisters. Tried The Amazing Race and just don't like the people that much, also, well, watching far too much tv right now. Desperate Housewives may be the only one I watch Sundays, while it wasn't as funny or entertaining as last weekend, it didn't annoy me as much either. Also long-time Kyle McLachlan fan - yes he's on the list of actors I've wasted time watching in horrid movies. I grew up with Kyle - I remember being first in line to see him in David Lynch's Dune way back in Junior High, at least I think it was Junior High.

1. Anthony Stewart Head (started with his performance in England in Chess in 1988.)
2. Anthony Hopkins (performance in King Lear in 1987 on London Stage. )
3. Kevin Spacey (Clarence Darrow on American Playhouse, then of course Mel Profit on WiseGuy)
4. James Spader (a very old Kim Richards film no one but me has probably seen, that aired in the early 80's prior to Pretty in Pink)
5. Kyle McLachlan (Dune, then well, Twin Peaks...and many others.)
6. James Marsters (guess?)

And eventually I give up. I gave up on ASH with Manchild, Hopkins with Meet Joe Black, Spacey with David Gale, Spader with Boston Legal, MacLachlan with Sex in the City, and Marsters with Smallville.
Sooner or later, you realize uhm, okay, maybe we should pay more attention to directors and writers instead of cast?

Then again, you never know they might surprise you.

Regarding Studio 60 it's reminding me more and more of Sports Night and less and less of West Wing, which I'm hoping is a good thing. Not as funny as last weeks. Course I saw last weeks on the internet, so there's that. Also last weeks debate over the show tainted my watching of it. Making me realize something -maybe I don't want to analyze and critique tv shows that much anymore. Nor do I want to worry about seeing every episode. I just want to sit back and enjoy the things when I find the time for them, that's what they're for after all. To distract, entertain, and possibly inform. If I hate it? I'm switching it off and going to bed or writing. One of the nice things about not having a roommate is not having to fight over what to watch on the tv set. Or for that matter defending what you want to watch to another person. There's something oddly freeing about that.

Oh, one more thing - on 60 Minutes Sunday night they had an entry about a new procedure being tried in Canada (I believe) that relieves depression for people who've tried everything under the sun. Apparently electrode are inserted in area 25 of the brain, the frontal lobe, and charged for a couple of seconds - they stimulate the brain. Severe depression apparently causes this area of the brain to slow down or the neurotransmitters not to transmit, so colors are subdued, everything is sort of drab, bit like living in a world with nothing but gray, overcast days. It doesn't last and it isn't a cure, but it can relieve the symptoms for a while and for lengthy periods. Anyone else heard of this? Was sort of interesting. May be worth looking into for the folks out there who can't get relief through any other means.

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That is three people on my flist including me that has found DH not annoying. How we judge our shows! LOL

I caught Heroes for the first time last night, second half, and I like it. I think I might now have a Monday lineup too. Wow, two nights in a row!

Hee. I'm wondering if we've all been annoyed by the same storylines/characters, but are ignoring them because Bree and Edie are so entertaining? Although Susan is growing on me again, they've done a good job of downplaying her antics this season. And well, I'm a long-time fan of Dougray Scott. Loved him since that Drew Barrymore film "Ever After".

I wish I only had two nights of tv lined up. Right now, sigh, have every day but Sat. This is NOT good. Am going to either have to get a DVR/new TV or just catch up with stuff via netflix in the summer. Because, I am not, repeat, not going to miss doing stuff just because a tv show is on. Did that with Buffy - and here I sit staring at DVD's of the show... what was I thinking. LOL!

why is it that every science fiction/fantasy show that appears on film or tv has to be creepy, violent or have elements of horror?
Well I think you're right all sci-fi/fantasy does (including comics and novels as well as TV & film): you can't have a small romance (Jane Austen) set in a fantasticaly world filled with magical beings, once you have super powered heroes then you really need a huge threat. And of course building up to the huge threat (so it plays well as an arc) requires that you have the creepy foreboding hints to what that threat will be. I think Joss came pretty close to reducing Buffy to a soap opera in S6, making her problems more and more mundane...but in the end you STILL had to have the apacolypic event to create a suitable climax.

And you didn't like 'Manchild'? I LOVED Manchild! LOL
(but then I love 'Boston Legal')
I like your list of actors to follow, and personally I got discouraged about Kevin Spacey in 'KPAX', 'Pay it Foreward', and 'Beyond the Sea'.

I've seen comics and novels that aren't necessarily violent or scarey that can be defined as Sci-Fi or even Fantasy. Not many. But have seen them. Just can't remember their titles at the moment.

I think Joss came pretty close to reducing Buffy to a soap opera in S6, making her problems more and more mundane...

Everytime I see this criticism, the first thing that goes through my head is - when was the last time you actually saw a soap opera? Truth is the only shows on TV that aren't like soap operas are the episodic procedurals - where it is basically, "oh so and so died, we have to figure out how" without talking about what's going on in the people's lives. Even reality shows are soap operas.

Buffy was a huge soap opera in Season 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. Less so in Seasons 1 and 7 because the focus was less on the interpersonal relationships and more on the outside big monster of the week. Or resovling something.

Soaps get a bad rap. Truth is they are serials. Charles Dickens and Shakespeare wrote what we call soap operas. They often don't have a precise beginning nor a precise ending. And violent?
Hee. Let me tell you the current plots of at least five tv shows that proudly call themselves soap operas:

1. A major character (T) buried another nasty character (G) alive in order to coaxe the truth out him regarding T's missing daughter. G had apparently given the child away in an illegal adoption. Unfortunately just as G was about to tell T the truth, an earthquake killed him.

2. An ex-husband came back from the dead and kidnapped a woman's children. Set it up so she'd think the child she had with that ex-husband died in a plane crash, so he could kidnap the child.

3. A vampire seduces a woman and she works hard to overcome his seduction and kill him with her friends.

4. Spies chase two lovers across the world.

5. Woman possessed by the devil

6. Guy kept frozen in suspended animation then woken up by his mother to wreck havoc on the world

All of those stories happened on soap operas. Usually soaps are far-fetched tales that require suspension of disbelief. BTVS and Angel were totally soap operas - children dropping in out of nowhere, people coming back from the dead, falling in love with the wrong person, wacky evil doctors, boyfriends being controlled by wacky evil doctors or entities? I've seen all of it in soap operas at least once.

Nah, sci-fi can be do soap opera or rather "space opera" - which is what some people called the original BattleStar Galatica, Star Wars, and Farscape.

If you take the violence away, you don't necessarily reduce it to a soap. And soaps love creepy. Every five years, one soap will do a slasher or serial killer storyline, just to trim it's cast.

No, people seem to think a story has to be a romance or have violence or have both. Yet, I've read things that have neither. I've even written them.

Yes, I can think of a few novels, but for an on-going series, not-very many romantic comedy sci-fi series. Actually, I'm curious to see how Eureka handles the classic sci-fi, and the house came alive and tried to kill them, story arc. On the whole it's such a cute show, which like Scarecrow and Mrs. King, has a deceptively high death count. Hmm...so, yeah, seems even the funny cute ones are violent.

I'm not really talking about "romantic-comedy" sci-fi, so much as non-creepy, non-horror, non-violent - which you can do without romantic-comedy. I think "Red Dwarf" did it a little. Saw some of it in a couple of Twilight Zone's and once or twice in short tales. Bits that are character pieces or about a morale dilemma. Like any genre it is possible to have a plot that does not end with the resolution of a crime, fighting a big evil, or a romantic entanglement.
But the focus seems to be on those resolutions. I remember that I did not like science fiction until I saw Star Wars - which was more space opera than horror movie. Granted it was violent, sort of a WWII movie meets a Western but in Space. But it wasn't scarey. At the same time, Alien came out by Ridely Scott, considered by many to be true sci-fi.

I'm not sure why the majority of films and series : Smallville, Buffy, Angel, Supernatural, Lost, The 4400, The Dead Zone, Heroes, BattleStar Galatica, Star-Gates - go for the scarey.
What is it about the genre that takes it to that place repeatedly?

Don't get me wrong - it's not necessarily a criticism or a bad thing. Just curious as to why. Is it how the audience is perceived? If so that makes sense, since every time I tell someone I love sci-fi, they immediately assume I want to see "Child's Play", "The Hills Have Eyes", "The Descent", all the Alien movies, and The Grudge. No. Really would rather not.

It's an interesting question, which I personally find hard to judge,
because I find my threshold is somewhat I higher than most people for
gore and violence. Although, oddly much lower for comedy. I found,
"Snakes on a Plane" funny, while Seinfeld depressed(s) me. When I see
people injured on screen, mostly I think about how the effect was
done, when people get their feelings hurt, I feel bad. But I digress.

It's a question my friends and I have been discussing a lot
recently, because it seems like more and more on the Sci Fi channel,
they play horror, rather than straight Science Fiction. Certainly more
so than their mix of Fantasy to Science Fiction.

"I'm not sure why the majority of films and series : Smallville, Buffy,
Angel, Supernatural, Lost, The 4400, The Dead Zone, Heroes, BattleStar
Galatica, Star-Gates - go for the scarey. What is it about the genre
that takes it to that place repeatedly?"

Well, I don't watch a lot of non-genre shows, so I don't know, is their level of violence/scary up as well?

I'm inclined to think that the fashion is not for character pieces and moral dillema's these days. Shows certainly have done them, but I'm not sure how well a post I want my MTV, excitement heavy television show would do. That lot seems to fall more to books.

But yeah, interesting question.

I like Heroes almost entirely for its characters, not the plot. The indestructible cheerleader, the psychic cop (yay, Greg Grunberg!), the Petrelli brothers, the soulful Indian professor, and especially, ESPECIALLY the Japanese office drone who can bend time and space are all RELATABLE personalities and you root for them--you want to see them come out all right.

(I'm iffy on Schizoid Stripper. Her bizarre situation is more interesting than her character at the moment. Not so enthralled with the superpowered serial killer plotline, either. That's been done too many times before in superhero comix, and this version doesn't seem to have a twist.)

The second episode cliffhanger was even better than last week's.

But you know the show had me when the cop said Hiro was a member of the Merry Marvel Marching Society.

Nitpick: No comic book sold on a newsstand has the writer/artist's address on the back.

I agree and am more or less tuning in for the same reasons. To be honest - I think most tv shows only work to the extent that you can identify with or fall in love with their characters.
Was chatting to a friend yesterday about the flick "All The Kings Men" - we were trying to figure out why we were the only ones who liked the flick, my friend loved it - even more than I did, and all the professional critics despised it. Came down to a simple thing - my friend identified with and loved the Jude Law character's story thread. It spoke to her. While everyone else was worried about the hackneyed political plot , which didn't make much sense to my friend and I either, she was taken by the narrator's plot and so was I.

In contrast - the film Lost in Translation, which everyone loved, I did not, not because of the plot - but the characters - I did not like them.

In every single writing course I've taken - they've said the same thing, build interesting characters. Plots are a dime a dozen. And they've been done a hundred times over. But characters are unique.

Heroes works for me - because it has some interesting characters, who on the surface may seem somewhat "stock" or "stereotypical" but the actors and writing is going against it. Claire Bennett, the indestructible cheerleader is played with a sense of alienation and vulnerability that reminds me of Gellar's Buffy, and her father could very well be the serial killer on the other end of the dead scientist's answering machine. Hiro, who is played with equal vulnerability and enthusiasm, could be the geeky stereotype if it weren't for the fact that the writers craftily made the character Japanese, living in Japan, and unable to speak a word of English. In Japan - comics are looked at far differently than here. Then there's Nikki, the schizode web porn star - they've put a nice twist on this character as well, who seems at the outset to be one thing, but is another - she's not a dumb blond nor for that matter weak, but possibly the deadliest character on the show. The series employs the ironic twist rather well in how it is developing its characters. The plot? Ah, I'm ambivalent about. But I tend to ignore plots on these types of shows, they are basically about a bunch of people banding together to save the world. Not that interesting. What is interesting is how the people get to that point, how they meet, and how they deal with their powers on the way to that point. In short the least interesting part of the series is how or if they'll save the world. And from what I've seen so far, I think the writers actually get that.

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