Teen Wolf: The Rewatch
As I mentioned in passing in that massive Teen Wolf Squee Post, my first attempt to get into the show failed rather miserably when the opening episodes did absolutely nothing for me. Now that I’ve cleared that first hurdle and established for my own record that the show not only improves past its rocky beginnings, but improves out of motherfucking sight, it occurred to me it would be an interesting scientific exercise to go back to those opening episodes and see whether they looked any better in retrospect, now I’ve done such a thorough job of biasing my reactions in their favour. There’s precedent for this sort of thing - back in the days of my brief and only mildly embarrassing fannish fling with Smallville, a couple of weeks of mainlining every Clark/Lex fic on the web with the fervour of the newly converted transformed my reactions to episode 1 of the same series all the way from the original ‘meh’ to ‘yeah, it’s still cheesy, but heeeee people really weren’t kidding about the amazing chemistry Lex has with, like, everything, yowzah!’ Would Teen Wolf go the same way?
As it turned out, even on a rewatch, the first three episodes are... not good.
We are talking ‘I can hardly even see the characters I know I am going to fall in love with later in these people’-levels of Not Good. There are a lot of problems I could pick apart, but if allowed to pick just one issue to run up my flagpole and wave around in protest, I’d go with how it takes up to the end of episode 3 to establish - or even suggest - that the evil werewolf who bit Scott and murdered that woman from ep. 1 was not Derek after all, but someone else entirely. There’s no reason why Derek couldn’t have told Scott this much back in episode one, and given that the misunderstanding results in Scott and Stiles getting him arrested for murder during episode 2, Derek’s failure to even try to explain what’s really going on isn’t just a little odd, it makes him look painfully stupid. Scott probably wouldn’t have believed him right away, but Derek would at least have given Scott a reason to trust him, which is something Derek badly needs at this point for all sorts of complicated reasons. Yes, Derek’s people skills are beyond terrible - this has since become a well established character trait of his - but on the whole we, the viewing audience, don't watch werewolf shows for the spectacle of seeing the heroes generate their own problems by failing Basic Communication 101.
What we’re seeing here, taking a step further back, is logic and characterisation being held hostage to the needs of pacing. The writers don’t want to swamp the audience with too much information too fast when we’re still introducing the core cast and mythology from the ground up. They want to establish the mundane ways that being a werewolf is complicating Scott’s life before revealing the existence of the season’s Big Bad, and they want to establish Derek as someone mysterious and untrustworthy so they can surprise us with the reveal that maybe he’s not so bad after all later on. This is all fine, but the story has to support it to make it work, and it doesn’t support it at all.
Coming at these episodes from retrospect, the really surprising part is that this is pretty much the exact problem I loved the later TW episodes for not having. By the middle of season 1, things have settled into a place where for the most part, characters are showing themselves capable of talking through their problems, figuring things out without needing the answers spelt out in large print, and when they do make mistakes (which never stops) they’re mistakes which I no longer have too much trouble forgiving them for in context. When characters fail to talk things out it’s generally because there are six different things going on at once and everyone is hardly keeping up as it is. Plot progress is driven by conflicts which arise naturally from the characters and premise, rather than any artificial need to maintain the status quo.
In all fairness on this point, TW is certainly benefiting in my estimation from how embarrassingly low the bar has been set for TV shows revolving around supernaturally gifted teenagers. Smallville, to go back to the obvious comparison-point, was pretty well hamstrung by the constraints of its premise right out of the gate. The day Clark finally became Superman the show would be over, and how the writers ever managed to squeeze ten seasons of material’s worth of ‘Clark does heroic stuff without being allowed to wear his trademark disguise or be seen doing it’ I do not even know (and I literally don’t - watching them try was already so painful by the middle of season 4 that I gave up). Merlin went down a similar road - season 1, if hardly high-brow entertainment, had enough halfway-decent ideas mixed with a lot of mindless fun to keep me engaged. But by season 2 the show’s dedication to keeping Merlin’s magic a secret and the evil king Uther in power was making it too obvious for comfort how much the producers’ need to maintain the status quo was being allowed to hobble the plot. Merlin’s magic couldn’t be made public as early as season 2, and everything else had to be tied in knots to accommodate that. Even if it meant Merlin telling lie after lie after lie to people he could and should have trusted.
Putting Merlin aside, British television usually does a much better job in this area when they’re not aiming at the teen market, if only because their seasons are usually only half as long and therefore don’t have to be padded with nearly so much filler. The last vampire/werewolf/general supernaturally themed show I got into was Being Human, which was about adults rather than teens and aimed at a much older audience, though it still dealt with a lot of the same themes of keeping secrets - both from the world at large and your closest friends. A lot of the ongoing conflict in Being Human revolves around the fact that the lead character, Mitchell, is not so much a Pacifist Vampire as a recovering blood-addict with a horrendously ugly past. He needs the comparative normality of his newbie-werewolf and newbie-ghost housemates to give him any chance of staying on the wagon (and they need his experience with the world of the supernatural just as much) but for obvious reasons he keeps them in the dark about a lot of what’s really going on with him for most of the series. If this is mostly understandable in context, it still becomes very frustrating to watch, and it only gets more frustrating when you factor in the occasional minor continuity issue which has characters offering each other sympathy and support one episode and then completely failing to communicate anything of importance in the next. Add in a general smattering of creep-of-the-week filler episodes, and the result was never quite as satisfying to watch as I wanted it to be.
Throw in a few years of reading superhero comics, and your patience with these sorts of themes grows very thin.
Forcing characters to keep secrets is easy from a writer’s POV because it generates instant conflict. It limits the number of people the hero can turn to for help, and it complicates every problem by requiring them to fix things without being seen. But the harder you lean on those themes, which generally means forcing your heroes to lie to their closest friends and family over and over again, the harder it becomes for the audience to sympathise with the need for secrecy, to the point they end up loathing the hero even more than the villains. So you can see how Teen Wolf was already sounding almost revolutionary to me when I was spoiled to know all but one of Scott’s friends would have learned about the werewolf situation by the end of season one, and even his mother was in the know by the end of season 2.
Of course, you can’t talk supernatural teen shows without talking Buffy. Quite apart from being consistently brilliantly written, Buffy also stood out as having tighter continuity than almost anything I’ve seen on TV before or since, regularly allowing characters to reference earlier events and almost never contradicting what came before. The status quo was set up such that maintaining it rarely got in the way of the plot, largely because Buffy’s secret is out to her mentor and closest friends in episode 1, and even to her mother by the end of season 2. Humour was such a big part of the show that even when inconsistencies did crop up, they could usually be lampshaded and laughed off on screen. There’s still a crapload of creep-of-the-week filler padding out each story arc, but that’s kind of the whole idea of life on the Hellmouth.
And yet, even though objectively I’d have to call it the better show, Buffy never got me invested on that id-level TW does. It’s hard to pin down why in simple terms; Buffy herself was certainly never as frustrating to watch as the worst of first-season-Scott, but I couldn’t relate to her non-slaying-related interests any more than Scott’s fixation on Lacrosse and Alison. On the other hand, Stiles has endeared himself to me in a way Xander never did; I find myself relating to Alison’s discomfort over being seen as weak in ways I never got from Willow or Buffy; Lydia has dimensions Cordelia had never even heard of; and Derek’s backstory and resulting issues are a hell of a lot easier to empathise with than Angel’s split-personality angst. The same core components are there - arguably even much of the same interest in subverting them for fun and profit - but the result is very different. Meanwhile, there’s no Giles to keep an eye on things, no threats so simple they can be cleanly dispatched in the space of an episode, and the plot never stops. You feel for the kids on TW the way you wouldn’t for early season Buffy because life never lets up on them and there’s no-one they can turn to for help. (Also, there’s a lot of angst, and a lot of attractive shirtless guys wandering around, which certainly does its bit to seal the deal.)
Getting this back to the point, it’s easy to see why producers love status quo-driven, episodic filler-based series so much. Season long story arcs are good for getting people to come back, but episodic stories are much easier to sell to the casual viewer who hasn’t been watching all season and wants to be able to jump in the middle. They’re also a hell of a lot easier to manage, especially when you’ve got several different writers developing different episodes in parallel. But I don’t think I’ve ever quite appreciated how much they can interrupt the flow of a story, simply by introducing events that get wrapped up so neatly they will in no way make an impact on the characters’ lives. A lot of what attracted me to anime to begin with was always how much it likes to focus telling an overarcing story rather than limiting itself to an episodic format, though in practice the need to avoid overtaking the manga keeps a lot of anime shamelessly filler-tastic. I have seen a lot of bad filler in my time. I cannot think of any time I’ve seen a comparable show that goes nearly so far as Teen Wolf does in doing away with it - and had consistently engaging characters in such a strongly character-driven narrative.
I’m just saying, the result has been really, really working for me.
Yes, I am already writing fic for it. It is still velithya’s fault.
As it turned out, even on a rewatch, the first three episodes are... not good.
We are talking ‘I can hardly even see the characters I know I am going to fall in love with later in these people’-levels of Not Good. There are a lot of problems I could pick apart, but if allowed to pick just one issue to run up my flagpole and wave around in protest, I’d go with how it takes up to the end of episode 3 to establish - or even suggest - that the evil werewolf who bit Scott and murdered that woman from ep. 1 was not Derek after all, but someone else entirely. There’s no reason why Derek couldn’t have told Scott this much back in episode one, and given that the misunderstanding results in Scott and Stiles getting him arrested for murder during episode 2, Derek’s failure to even try to explain what’s really going on isn’t just a little odd, it makes him look painfully stupid. Scott probably wouldn’t have believed him right away, but Derek would at least have given Scott a reason to trust him, which is something Derek badly needs at this point for all sorts of complicated reasons. Yes, Derek’s people skills are beyond terrible - this has since become a well established character trait of his - but on the whole we, the viewing audience, don't watch werewolf shows for the spectacle of seeing the heroes generate their own problems by failing Basic Communication 101.
What we’re seeing here, taking a step further back, is logic and characterisation being held hostage to the needs of pacing. The writers don’t want to swamp the audience with too much information too fast when we’re still introducing the core cast and mythology from the ground up. They want to establish the mundane ways that being a werewolf is complicating Scott’s life before revealing the existence of the season’s Big Bad, and they want to establish Derek as someone mysterious and untrustworthy so they can surprise us with the reveal that maybe he’s not so bad after all later on. This is all fine, but the story has to support it to make it work, and it doesn’t support it at all.
Coming at these episodes from retrospect, the really surprising part is that this is pretty much the exact problem I loved the later TW episodes for not having. By the middle of season 1, things have settled into a place where for the most part, characters are showing themselves capable of talking through their problems, figuring things out without needing the answers spelt out in large print, and when they do make mistakes (which never stops) they’re mistakes which I no longer have too much trouble forgiving them for in context. When characters fail to talk things out it’s generally because there are six different things going on at once and everyone is hardly keeping up as it is. Plot progress is driven by conflicts which arise naturally from the characters and premise, rather than any artificial need to maintain the status quo.
In all fairness on this point, TW is certainly benefiting in my estimation from how embarrassingly low the bar has been set for TV shows revolving around supernaturally gifted teenagers. Smallville, to go back to the obvious comparison-point, was pretty well hamstrung by the constraints of its premise right out of the gate. The day Clark finally became Superman the show would be over, and how the writers ever managed to squeeze ten seasons of material’s worth of ‘Clark does heroic stuff without being allowed to wear his trademark disguise or be seen doing it’ I do not even know (and I literally don’t - watching them try was already so painful by the middle of season 4 that I gave up). Merlin went down a similar road - season 1, if hardly high-brow entertainment, had enough halfway-decent ideas mixed with a lot of mindless fun to keep me engaged. But by season 2 the show’s dedication to keeping Merlin’s magic a secret and the evil king Uther in power was making it too obvious for comfort how much the producers’ need to maintain the status quo was being allowed to hobble the plot. Merlin’s magic couldn’t be made public as early as season 2, and everything else had to be tied in knots to accommodate that. Even if it meant Merlin telling lie after lie after lie to people he could and should have trusted.
Putting Merlin aside, British television usually does a much better job in this area when they’re not aiming at the teen market, if only because their seasons are usually only half as long and therefore don’t have to be padded with nearly so much filler. The last vampire/werewolf/general supernaturally themed show I got into was Being Human, which was about adults rather than teens and aimed at a much older audience, though it still dealt with a lot of the same themes of keeping secrets - both from the world at large and your closest friends. A lot of the ongoing conflict in Being Human revolves around the fact that the lead character, Mitchell, is not so much a Pacifist Vampire as a recovering blood-addict with a horrendously ugly past. He needs the comparative normality of his newbie-werewolf and newbie-ghost housemates to give him any chance of staying on the wagon (and they need his experience with the world of the supernatural just as much) but for obvious reasons he keeps them in the dark about a lot of what’s really going on with him for most of the series. If this is mostly understandable in context, it still becomes very frustrating to watch, and it only gets more frustrating when you factor in the occasional minor continuity issue which has characters offering each other sympathy and support one episode and then completely failing to communicate anything of importance in the next. Add in a general smattering of creep-of-the-week filler episodes, and the result was never quite as satisfying to watch as I wanted it to be.
Throw in a few years of reading superhero comics, and your patience with these sorts of themes grows very thin.
Forcing characters to keep secrets is easy from a writer’s POV because it generates instant conflict. It limits the number of people the hero can turn to for help, and it complicates every problem by requiring them to fix things without being seen. But the harder you lean on those themes, which generally means forcing your heroes to lie to their closest friends and family over and over again, the harder it becomes for the audience to sympathise with the need for secrecy, to the point they end up loathing the hero even more than the villains. So you can see how Teen Wolf was already sounding almost revolutionary to me when I was spoiled to know all but one of Scott’s friends would have learned about the werewolf situation by the end of season one, and even his mother was in the know by the end of season 2.
Of course, you can’t talk supernatural teen shows without talking Buffy. Quite apart from being consistently brilliantly written, Buffy also stood out as having tighter continuity than almost anything I’ve seen on TV before or since, regularly allowing characters to reference earlier events and almost never contradicting what came before. The status quo was set up such that maintaining it rarely got in the way of the plot, largely because Buffy’s secret is out to her mentor and closest friends in episode 1, and even to her mother by the end of season 2. Humour was such a big part of the show that even when inconsistencies did crop up, they could usually be lampshaded and laughed off on screen. There’s still a crapload of creep-of-the-week filler padding out each story arc, but that’s kind of the whole idea of life on the Hellmouth.
And yet, even though objectively I’d have to call it the better show, Buffy never got me invested on that id-level TW does. It’s hard to pin down why in simple terms; Buffy herself was certainly never as frustrating to watch as the worst of first-season-Scott, but I couldn’t relate to her non-slaying-related interests any more than Scott’s fixation on Lacrosse and Alison. On the other hand, Stiles has endeared himself to me in a way Xander never did; I find myself relating to Alison’s discomfort over being seen as weak in ways I never got from Willow or Buffy; Lydia has dimensions Cordelia had never even heard of; and Derek’s backstory and resulting issues are a hell of a lot easier to empathise with than Angel’s split-personality angst. The same core components are there - arguably even much of the same interest in subverting them for fun and profit - but the result is very different. Meanwhile, there’s no Giles to keep an eye on things, no threats so simple they can be cleanly dispatched in the space of an episode, and the plot never stops. You feel for the kids on TW the way you wouldn’t for early season Buffy because life never lets up on them and there’s no-one they can turn to for help. (Also, there’s a lot of angst, and a lot of attractive shirtless guys wandering around, which certainly does its bit to seal the deal.)
Getting this back to the point, it’s easy to see why producers love status quo-driven, episodic filler-based series so much. Season long story arcs are good for getting people to come back, but episodic stories are much easier to sell to the casual viewer who hasn’t been watching all season and wants to be able to jump in the middle. They’re also a hell of a lot easier to manage, especially when you’ve got several different writers developing different episodes in parallel. But I don’t think I’ve ever quite appreciated how much they can interrupt the flow of a story, simply by introducing events that get wrapped up so neatly they will in no way make an impact on the characters’ lives. A lot of what attracted me to anime to begin with was always how much it likes to focus telling an overarcing story rather than limiting itself to an episodic format, though in practice the need to avoid overtaking the manga keeps a lot of anime shamelessly filler-tastic. I have seen a lot of bad filler in my time. I cannot think of any time I’ve seen a comparable show that goes nearly so far as Teen Wolf does in doing away with it - and had consistently engaging characters in such a strongly character-driven narrative.
I’m just saying, the result has been really, really working for me.
Yes, I am already writing fic for it. It is still velithya’s fault.