how serial fiction broke clio's heart, part 2: the long bad summer
In my tags list, I have 14 tags that refer to specific "canons." Of those, 5 are reality shows, one is a book series, and the other 8 are scripted television shows. I'm going to talk now about a summer in which many of them ended, and others ended for me.
But let's start with the positive: I love Six Feet Under. It had its rough patches in the middle, and "That's My Dog" was a horrible hour of television, but the final season was an amazing 13 episodes of television, and the final episode was deeply, richly satisfying. For me, one thing that's right up there was Alan Ball's unwillingness to break up David and Keith for the sake of drama. This isn't about shipping here, but about what makes narrative sense for the show, and as Ball pointed out, they'd already done a season of David being single and dating around. Why do another one? Why not give David and Keith two huge problems (David's anxiety after the carjacking and Keith's departure from the LAPD) and a huge goal (adopting some children) that they have to face together? There would be tension in their relationship, sure, and bad moments, but the ultimate end is not their breakup. (Besides, Nate and Brenda were the obverse, the people who weren't actually good for each other at all but couldn't quite get rid of each other. And for singleton power, you had Claire and Ruth.)
On the other hand, despite many attempts, I just do not like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The whole show feels emotionally brittle to me, and Joss Whedon's need for constant instability is wearying. It's like a room with very busy prints on all the surfaces, which never gives your eye a place to rest. And there's this thing, this jazz, this oomph to the show that I know feeds many of you--the action? the mythology? the drama?--but none of that feeds me. I've seen one episode of Firefly and I intend to watch the rest, but the fact that Whedon would have broken up Wash and Zoe if he'd had a season two is all I need to know that I should never, ever watch a Joss Whedon show.
Right, on to 2007. I found Ugly Betty to be a charming show. I was initially interested because I knew about the novela, knew how it ended, and wanted to see what changes they'd make in bringing it to the US market. And I loved the entire Henry storyline; it was all kinds of adorable. And then the show reminded me, at the end, that it was still basically a nighttime soap opera, what with the (to my mind) silly plot twist of Henry's pregnant girlfriend. I did watch some of the second season, but I was unenthusiastic, what with Alexis always winning out over Daniel, etc. It's still a cute show, just not the show for me. 17 May 2007: strike one.
I got into CSI during the summer of 2005, when I was getting ready to go back to school. I'd heard about "Grave Danger," the infamous Tarantino-directed season 5 finale where Nick is buried alive in a Plexiglas box, and to be honest, I'd read some Gil/Nick slash. I liked Nick a lot as a character, and really the only reason I had tuned out after the first episode was that Billy Peterson bears a striking resemblance to my brother, and there was a tiresome subplot about a crooked judge taking advantage of Warrick's gambling addiction.
But season 6 coming out of "Grave Danger" didn't follow up on anything it suggested. We saw very little of Nick's recovery from his trauma (as it turns out, George Eads had requested that the writers not emphasize the PTSD because it might make Nick, a character we'd already seen cry on screen on more than one occasion, a "wimp") which made Nick's character strangely all over the place--and why is he still asking stupid questions when he's been a CSI for this long? They wasted the interesting sexual tension between Warrick and Catherine by marrying him off to an off-screen character, leaving Cath and her sexuality swinging out there attracting danger again. Then there was the badly done reveal of the Gil-Sara romance at the end of season 6. I figured the show was headed in that direction, because there had been a good bit of teasing in earlier seasons, and Sara asking Gil out only to be turned down. But why, then, was our reveal not of them finally getting together, but of them already mysteriously in a relationship? How does this pay off on all that teasing? Where is my "reward" as a viewer?
Season 7 did me no better. Nick continued to be uninteresting, Gil wandered off for a while in the middle, nothing more was done with the Gil and Sara relationship, Cath continued to be punished for daring to express her sexuality, Greg had a tiresome subplot that was supposed to be about race but wasn't actually about anything at all. The Miniature Killer case on the one hand was compelling, but on the other hand was yet another serial killer case. I decided to ditch the show after the season 8 premiere, when the case was solved, because clearly the show wasn't interested in ever really paying off on the character issues it laid down like "gum drops" in earlier episodes. And man, I'm glad I did, because what happened to Warrick in season 8 was just wrong, regardless of the actor's drug problem. 17 May 2007: strike two.
I saw the pilot for Veronica Mars and pretty much immediately fell in love. I know many saw it as a kind of new Buffy, and I agree--that was how I recommended it to Cassie, at least. But it had so much that I never saw in Buffy. These people had real emotions that they weren't completely afraid to express. Bad shit had happened, and they were changed by it. And yet, little glimpses of hope poked through Veronica's bitterness--you could see the pep squad girl she had been. And her love for her father showed in every frame. The mystery for season 1 was amazing, compelling. The mystery for season 2 wasn't as fantastic, but it was still very good, even if they all but created a character in order to sacrifice him. The pacing was a little off, because the network was dicking around with scheduling and also because Rob Thomas had to work around actor absences due to his limited budget. But I still felt it was a good, solid season.
And then there was season 3. High school shows rarely fare well in college, it's true, and VM had to introduce some new characters (which they did very well, I mean, Piz!). Unfortunately Logan had little to do (why couldn't he have been off looking for his mother?), Weevil was barely in evidence (why bother giving him the college job when you barely used him?), and Wallace also seemed superfluous to Veronica's ongoing love drama. Keith was finally on the upswing, except that he sort of wasn't. The mini-arcs didn't work, the final one that they had been saving Mac for had to be scrapped, and the final episode of the show threatened to return us to zero state, after all that had happened in the last three years. There was talk of a Veronica in the FBI time jump, but it never sounded fully formed, and as sad and disappointed as I was in season 3, I was relieved to hear of the cancellation. 22 May 2007: strike three, but since this isn't baseball, there's more coming.
And then there was Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Now, I'd never been that much of a West Wing fan; it was a little frenetic, a little pat, a little too facile in its handling of human behavior and world events, not unlike its sire, An American President. I like the movie, but everything in it is just a little too easy, the bad guys too buffoonish, the good guys too perfectly flawed, like A Few Good Men. But I really love Matthew Perry--Chandler!--and the premise was intriguing, so I thought I'd watch.
Yeah. A lot of you know by now what a complete and total clusterfuck that show turned out to be, one of the more frustrating viewing experiences of my life. Matt could have been an interesting character, except for the part where he knew better than everyone else how they should live their lives, especially Harriet. Thought the same could be said for Danny stalking Jordan until he can help her realize what she wants. ugh. I loved the characters, hated almost everything they did, and particularly hated the condescension that Matt had for everyone (including the woman he supposedly loved) and the show, eventually, had for its viewers. While we all knew by the time the show went into hiatus in February what we had on our hands, it was like a car wreck, and I actually watched the final five episodes just to see what Sorkin would do with them. 28 June 2007: strike four.
Oh Harry, when did it all start to go so wrong? Was it back in May 2003 when I read OotP and had my first misgivings of where canon was headed? But I still had hope--I attended Nimbus that summer and had a lot of fun. I was still active in nocturne alley and happily beta'ing several fics. Was it in 2004 when JKR let some interviewers lead her into calling fans like me delusional? Could be; that was certainly the beginning of an unhappy feeling of being very unwelcome in Potter fandom. But I really liked HBP, absurd and hormone-filled as it was, and it actually restored some of the faith I'd lost when I read OotP. When I headed to the Borders at midnight to pick up my copy of DH, I was cautiously optimistic. I read a chapter or so of the book, and then went to bed and picked it up the next morning, as was my method with HBP. And what I read? Well, my initial reaction was sort of okay, in a "well, if that's what you want to do, Jo, that's fine" kind of way.
But the more I thought about it, the more disappointed I was. And the more others talked about it, the more I realized that with OotP the canon had moved in a direction that didn't interest me. I had thought I was reading a combination of coming-of-age story and hero's tale, with plenty of mystery. Turns out, there was no coming-of-age here, because everyone's character was fixed at 11. That's why they could be sorted. That's why they could find their life partner before the age of 17. Dumbledore said that your choices reveal who you are--reveal, not make, because you already are who you are; the choices just make it manifest to the world.
But more than that, the ending of the HP series really shocked my confidence in my ability to read a narrative. That crowd that was well satisfied with canon--not so different, incidentally, from that crowd that thought that I was delusional--would say that indeed, I had either willfully or stupidly misread the entire series. I had put something into them (namely, character change and a kind of subtlety about good v evil) that was never there to begin with. I had tried to subvert the narrative, and now I was being punished. If I didn't like the story, it was my own damn fault. I had never been much for canon prediction; I figure the canon will reveal itself eventually, so why play those games? But I admit, I thought the books were going a place they didn't go, and I felt both cheated out of something that could have been great, and humiliated by a fandom that openly mocked me for my misinterpretation. 21 July 2007: strike five, but it was the cruelest blow.
So, what have we learned?
Lesson 4: Don't get involved in a serial narrative whose narrative priorities are different than yours--namely, character change/development and, if there are romances, a satisfying romance. The narrative will work to preserve its own priorities, and even if it threw a few crumbs to these other issues, it will jettison them all if it has to in order to preserve its priority, be it world building/philosophy or action/adventure or a kind of procedural "plot." In other words, be really, really careful about "genre", because most of it won't you what you crave.
Lesson 5: Best case scenario, don't get involved in an unfinished serial narrative, especially in American network television, with their sort-of-but-not-really narrative arcs that don't lead to satisfying endings and their need to "shake things up" to create drama by never letting the couple get together, or breaking up the team.
Lesson 6: Steer clear of canons with open shipping, because if there's really a love triangle it means they're not going to build either of the pairings up very well. Also, it makes for a vicious fandom.
Next: How Avatar almost, but not quite, soothed my PTSD, and why I went running off to reality television.
But let's start with the positive: I love Six Feet Under. It had its rough patches in the middle, and "That's My Dog" was a horrible hour of television, but the final season was an amazing 13 episodes of television, and the final episode was deeply, richly satisfying. For me, one thing that's right up there was Alan Ball's unwillingness to break up David and Keith for the sake of drama. This isn't about shipping here, but about what makes narrative sense for the show, and as Ball pointed out, they'd already done a season of David being single and dating around. Why do another one? Why not give David and Keith two huge problems (David's anxiety after the carjacking and Keith's departure from the LAPD) and a huge goal (adopting some children) that they have to face together? There would be tension in their relationship, sure, and bad moments, but the ultimate end is not their breakup. (Besides, Nate and Brenda were the obverse, the people who weren't actually good for each other at all but couldn't quite get rid of each other. And for singleton power, you had Claire and Ruth.)
On the other hand, despite many attempts, I just do not like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The whole show feels emotionally brittle to me, and Joss Whedon's need for constant instability is wearying. It's like a room with very busy prints on all the surfaces, which never gives your eye a place to rest. And there's this thing, this jazz, this oomph to the show that I know feeds many of you--the action? the mythology? the drama?--but none of that feeds me. I've seen one episode of Firefly and I intend to watch the rest, but the fact that Whedon would have broken up Wash and Zoe if he'd had a season two is all I need to know that I should never, ever watch a Joss Whedon show.
Right, on to 2007. I found Ugly Betty to be a charming show. I was initially interested because I knew about the novela, knew how it ended, and wanted to see what changes they'd make in bringing it to the US market. And I loved the entire Henry storyline; it was all kinds of adorable. And then the show reminded me, at the end, that it was still basically a nighttime soap opera, what with the (to my mind) silly plot twist of Henry's pregnant girlfriend. I did watch some of the second season, but I was unenthusiastic, what with Alexis always winning out over Daniel, etc. It's still a cute show, just not the show for me. 17 May 2007: strike one.
I got into CSI during the summer of 2005, when I was getting ready to go back to school. I'd heard about "Grave Danger," the infamous Tarantino-directed season 5 finale where Nick is buried alive in a Plexiglas box, and to be honest, I'd read some Gil/Nick slash. I liked Nick a lot as a character, and really the only reason I had tuned out after the first episode was that Billy Peterson bears a striking resemblance to my brother, and there was a tiresome subplot about a crooked judge taking advantage of Warrick's gambling addiction.
But season 6 coming out of "Grave Danger" didn't follow up on anything it suggested. We saw very little of Nick's recovery from his trauma (as it turns out, George Eads had requested that the writers not emphasize the PTSD because it might make Nick, a character we'd already seen cry on screen on more than one occasion, a "wimp") which made Nick's character strangely all over the place--and why is he still asking stupid questions when he's been a CSI for this long? They wasted the interesting sexual tension between Warrick and Catherine by marrying him off to an off-screen character, leaving Cath and her sexuality swinging out there attracting danger again. Then there was the badly done reveal of the Gil-Sara romance at the end of season 6. I figured the show was headed in that direction, because there had been a good bit of teasing in earlier seasons, and Sara asking Gil out only to be turned down. But why, then, was our reveal not of them finally getting together, but of them already mysteriously in a relationship? How does this pay off on all that teasing? Where is my "reward" as a viewer?
Season 7 did me no better. Nick continued to be uninteresting, Gil wandered off for a while in the middle, nothing more was done with the Gil and Sara relationship, Cath continued to be punished for daring to express her sexuality, Greg had a tiresome subplot that was supposed to be about race but wasn't actually about anything at all. The Miniature Killer case on the one hand was compelling, but on the other hand was yet another serial killer case. I decided to ditch the show after the season 8 premiere, when the case was solved, because clearly the show wasn't interested in ever really paying off on the character issues it laid down like "gum drops" in earlier episodes. And man, I'm glad I did, because what happened to Warrick in season 8 was just wrong, regardless of the actor's drug problem. 17 May 2007: strike two.
I saw the pilot for Veronica Mars and pretty much immediately fell in love. I know many saw it as a kind of new Buffy, and I agree--that was how I recommended it to Cassie, at least. But it had so much that I never saw in Buffy. These people had real emotions that they weren't completely afraid to express. Bad shit had happened, and they were changed by it. And yet, little glimpses of hope poked through Veronica's bitterness--you could see the pep squad girl she had been. And her love for her father showed in every frame. The mystery for season 1 was amazing, compelling. The mystery for season 2 wasn't as fantastic, but it was still very good, even if they all but created a character in order to sacrifice him. The pacing was a little off, because the network was dicking around with scheduling and also because Rob Thomas had to work around actor absences due to his limited budget. But I still felt it was a good, solid season.
And then there was season 3. High school shows rarely fare well in college, it's true, and VM had to introduce some new characters (which they did very well, I mean, Piz!). Unfortunately Logan had little to do (why couldn't he have been off looking for his mother?), Weevil was barely in evidence (why bother giving him the college job when you barely used him?), and Wallace also seemed superfluous to Veronica's ongoing love drama. Keith was finally on the upswing, except that he sort of wasn't. The mini-arcs didn't work, the final one that they had been saving Mac for had to be scrapped, and the final episode of the show threatened to return us to zero state, after all that had happened in the last three years. There was talk of a Veronica in the FBI time jump, but it never sounded fully formed, and as sad and disappointed as I was in season 3, I was relieved to hear of the cancellation. 22 May 2007: strike three, but since this isn't baseball, there's more coming.
And then there was Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Now, I'd never been that much of a West Wing fan; it was a little frenetic, a little pat, a little too facile in its handling of human behavior and world events, not unlike its sire, An American President. I like the movie, but everything in it is just a little too easy, the bad guys too buffoonish, the good guys too perfectly flawed, like A Few Good Men. But I really love Matthew Perry--Chandler!--and the premise was intriguing, so I thought I'd watch.
Yeah. A lot of you know by now what a complete and total clusterfuck that show turned out to be, one of the more frustrating viewing experiences of my life. Matt could have been an interesting character, except for the part where he knew better than everyone else how they should live their lives, especially Harriet. Thought the same could be said for Danny stalking Jordan until he can help her realize what she wants. ugh. I loved the characters, hated almost everything they did, and particularly hated the condescension that Matt had for everyone (including the woman he supposedly loved) and the show, eventually, had for its viewers. While we all knew by the time the show went into hiatus in February what we had on our hands, it was like a car wreck, and I actually watched the final five episodes just to see what Sorkin would do with them. 28 June 2007: strike four.
Oh Harry, when did it all start to go so wrong? Was it back in May 2003 when I read OotP and had my first misgivings of where canon was headed? But I still had hope--I attended Nimbus that summer and had a lot of fun. I was still active in nocturne alley and happily beta'ing several fics. Was it in 2004 when JKR let some interviewers lead her into calling fans like me delusional? Could be; that was certainly the beginning of an unhappy feeling of being very unwelcome in Potter fandom. But I really liked HBP, absurd and hormone-filled as it was, and it actually restored some of the faith I'd lost when I read OotP. When I headed to the Borders at midnight to pick up my copy of DH, I was cautiously optimistic. I read a chapter or so of the book, and then went to bed and picked it up the next morning, as was my method with HBP. And what I read? Well, my initial reaction was sort of okay, in a "well, if that's what you want to do, Jo, that's fine" kind of way.
But the more I thought about it, the more disappointed I was. And the more others talked about it, the more I realized that with OotP the canon had moved in a direction that didn't interest me. I had thought I was reading a combination of coming-of-age story and hero's tale, with plenty of mystery. Turns out, there was no coming-of-age here, because everyone's character was fixed at 11. That's why they could be sorted. That's why they could find their life partner before the age of 17. Dumbledore said that your choices reveal who you are--reveal, not make, because you already are who you are; the choices just make it manifest to the world.
But more than that, the ending of the HP series really shocked my confidence in my ability to read a narrative. That crowd that was well satisfied with canon--not so different, incidentally, from that crowd that thought that I was delusional--would say that indeed, I had either willfully or stupidly misread the entire series. I had put something into them (namely, character change and a kind of subtlety about good v evil) that was never there to begin with. I had tried to subvert the narrative, and now I was being punished. If I didn't like the story, it was my own damn fault. I had never been much for canon prediction; I figure the canon will reveal itself eventually, so why play those games? But I admit, I thought the books were going a place they didn't go, and I felt both cheated out of something that could have been great, and humiliated by a fandom that openly mocked me for my misinterpretation. 21 July 2007: strike five, but it was the cruelest blow.
So, what have we learned?
Lesson 4: Don't get involved in a serial narrative whose narrative priorities are different than yours--namely, character change/development and, if there are romances, a satisfying romance. The narrative will work to preserve its own priorities, and even if it threw a few crumbs to these other issues, it will jettison them all if it has to in order to preserve its priority, be it world building/philosophy or action/adventure or a kind of procedural "plot." In other words, be really, really careful about "genre", because most of it won't you what you crave.
Lesson 5: Best case scenario, don't get involved in an unfinished serial narrative, especially in American network television, with their sort-of-but-not-really narrative arcs that don't lead to satisfying endings and their need to "shake things up" to create drama by never letting the couple get together, or breaking up the team.
Lesson 6: Steer clear of canons with open shipping, because if there's really a love triangle it means they're not going to build either of the pairings up very well. Also, it makes for a vicious fandom.
Next: How Avatar almost, but not quite, soothed my PTSD, and why I went running off to reality television.