a lot of thoughts on television political drama

[pocochina]

A reviewer at.....Slate? I wanna say Slate, in an argument that the US House of Cards doesn’t count as political drama, compared the show to Game of Thrones. In my lingering irritation at the article - um, spoiler alert, the titular game is not musical chairs - I started to condense some thoughts about what, exactly, political drama is, and how it

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I feel like I'm not very good at thinking in political terms? Or, more precisely, I lack the knowledge of history and the current political landscape (...especially US political landscape, as a non-American) to write about things with the same degree of intelligence that you do.

BTVS SPOILERS: That out of the way, a friend of mine talks about BtVS in very political terms, mostly in private conversations which I can't link to directly (or do real justice to) with most of the major characters being associated with some political philosophy or another -- Giles the old-guard service-oriented conservative, Spike the extreme libertarian anarchist whose actions are almost always dependent on what's good for him and his very small circle, Willow the post-modern scientist/radical socialist individualist with revolutionary leanings, Riley the authoritarian academic -- which I think is pretty instructive; Buffy generally is not committed to any one philosophy, but borrows the best (and sometimes the worst) of the different philosophies to build her identity, and the redemption stories that the various characters go through is something of a similar system. (i.e. Giles' dedication to service is admirable and remains in "Chosen," but he has to let go of his patriarchal, regressive tendencies and fear of change; Willow's for-the-betterment-of-the-world radicalism eventually becomes destructive and has to be tempered by limits on her use of power but changing the world for the better is still on the table; Spike's breaking down established structures and emphasis on the close personal connection over the big picture is valuable but he has to broaden his circle to include not just Drusilla or Buffy but some consideration for humanity as a whole; Riley's desire for a structured life is helpful but he has to work against the imposition of structure on people unwilling to receive it, which is why his last act in the series is to remove Spike's chip by proxy in "The Killer in Me," etc.)

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THE WIRE SPOILERS: One of the things that The Wire gets right is that in a society, especially a capitalist society though I think that it's not actually down to capitalism-qua-capitalism alone, is the way in which people fill vacuums. Certainly it's true of the politicians, but it's also true of everyone who takes any job or role, whether legal or illegal, or someone like Omar who is ostensibly not part of the system at all; people are able to hold onto positions only insofar as those positions represent some need that other people have that is not fulfilled by everyone else. Carcetti can't institute grand sweeping political changes that are going to be unpopular, which means that whatever his initial ideas are that run counter to the way things are done eventually get ground down into almost nothing. The system (which is really a matter of statistics -- numbers of people, as well as certain powerful players, who themselves are generally beholden to the numbers of people) demands that people behave a certain way, under threat of losing their jobs and thus their lives, and the possibility of making positive changes (in oneself or others) are severely limited. The true visionaries who actually are able to create new roles for themselves, or find a way to game the system, generally are eventually defeated because this can only be sustained for so long (hence Stringer and Omar die, Avon goes to jail, McNulty and Bunny get fired, etc.). I tend to think that the difference between Carcetti and Royce eventually becomes almost imperceptible, though the reason Carcetti becomes Royce is because of exceptional external circumstances.

I tend to think in terms of scientific principles, and I mean this basically as a metaphor rather than an actual statement of fact. But basically any process is going to increase entropy; it is unavoidable. Entropy is not intrinsically bad, but it's intrinsically associated with decay and death. Sometimes the things that decay are bad things that should have died. But ultimately any structure needs a constant flow of "free energy" in in order to maintain it and not collapse. Baltimore is a dying city, and part of that is that there are very few people with any real degree of "free energy" with which to enact change to help prevent the structures from collapsing. I think of it this way: Carcetti may want initially to hire a Daniels and not a Valchek, but because the amount of room with which to navigate the system and still keep his job is limited, he has to do the "easier" thing, the thing which requires lower energy (/commitment/resources), rather than the thing that requires more energy (/commitment/resources). This goes on every level -- up to and including Jimmy who has to make the cost-benefit analysis of whether to drink or not, when he has a finite amount of internal resources for coping with the stresses of his job and he can only really maintain his commitment to sobriety when he's on the beat rather than in homicide or major crimes, and is dedicating fewer of his internal resources to a grand fight against the entire system.

[pocochina]

ooooh, yes, this analysis is so up my alley, though I've never really fleshed it out to that extent.