Lost the Plot
So it seems to me that there is a point in the life-span of any "cult" show that things... change. I'm not necessarily talking about jumping the shark, but certainly a slight deviation which may still be good - but sometimes a little strange or uncharacteristic. The reason I bring this up is manifold:
Lost
OK, so let's be blunt and say that this is the show that's really prompted this the most I think. I still watch Lost and I'm actually still enjoying it, but I'm the first to admit that things have really gotten strange(r). What started as a curious mystery has entangled itself into a labyrinth of confusion. The plot seems to be as lost as everyone else. It stopped being simply about people lost on an island a long, long time ago. Here's a simple exercise you can do to demonstrate how far off the plot Lost seems to drift from time to time.
Step One: You will need a piece of paper and a pen. On that blank piece of paper pick any spot on that page and carefully draw a single dot.
Step Two: Write underneath that dot "THE PLOT".
Step Three: Carefully fold the paper and place it into an envelope. Do not put any address or stamp on the envelope but proceed to the post-box and mail it.
Step Four: Now download the plans for a time machine and construct one.
Step Five: Travel a little to the future and write down five winning lottery numbers. Travel back a bit and win the lottery five times. Now invest everything in a bank account with a high rate of interest. Now get back into the time travel machine and travel far into the future to a point in time when we have interstellar travel. With the trillions you now have in your bank account fund the construction of the largest interstellar ship ever built with cryogenic freezers or some form of suspended animation. Lock yourself away in one of those and set the autopilot to the edge of the galaxy. Then drift out a little further into the black. If you're lucky you may have just gotten about as far from the plot as Lost.
Now, I'm sure they'll wrap things up in some ingenious way, but you really have to wonder sometimes...
Battlestar Galactica
It's quite simple:
Mini-series: Normal.
Series One: Relatively normal.
Series Two: A little strange in places but otherwise comparatively normal.
Series Three: Things are getting a bit frickin' odd now. The normal to strange ratio seems to have gone off kilter a little. Oh - no, wait - yeah, there it went just towards the end. Right off the edge there.
Series Four point zero: Do we have any superglue?
Series Four point five: Whooo-weee, you gotta try this shit, man.
People thought Farscape took a bit of a strange turn but this is a real example of strange turns. I mean, if you'd have told me way back during the miniseries what would be going on now I ... well, in truth I probably wouldn't have bothered watching it. However, that said I'm still enjoying it because it's turned out to be really good, but I have to wonder how someone can go from "man vs machine" to "man vs machine vs older machines vs "god" vs man vs um we'll think of something else - give us a mo".
Of course, I'm still hooked (I just hope I won't be bitterly disappointed by the finale).
24: Day 7
It seems crazy that they've managed to do seven series of this show. Now I know that 24 has had its ups and downs for anyone who has been watching them all. For instance, the whole Kim vs the cougar silliness in Day 2 to name but one and the many deaths of Jack Bauer in a single day with no side effects or hospitalisation to name but another. Day 1 was as near as flawless, but with each subsequent Day (series) we're asked to sustain disbelief even more and more, for example, everywhere in LA seems to be accessible in 15 minutes which anyone living in LA will tell you is a joke. It is apparently notorious for heavy traffic. Furthermore, nobody seems to need to eat, drink fluids, or go to the toilet. Such realities are sacrificed in the name of drama, however, in an effort to pack in more drama the speed at which things progress has in recent Days stretched credibility to breaking point. In the last series I remember a scene during which someone at CTU rung the president's man to update him. In almost the next breath he's walking into the president's office and gives an exposition lasting longer than the interval. Likewise paramedics seem to be hanging around on every street corner just waiting for something to do and are therefore on the scene in about -5 seconds flat. I use the negative for a very good reason. The makers of 24 play with their "real-time" very liberally these days making use of the split second between the end of one episode and the start of another to magically move the plot forward. For instance, someone could be only just shot at the end of one episode (dink-dunk-dink-dunk-cue music) and at the start of the next episode (the following takes place exactly seconds after we left off - or so we'll have you believe) the ever-present paramedics are running all over the place, police have already cordoned off the area, etc.
However, despite the ramble, it is not about this that I include 24 here. It's due to the fact that it seems that 24 has managed to do the unthinkable - it has dumbed down the real-time format.
I remember Murder One back in 1995 proved difficult for many Americans to follow considering it was predominantly a legal drama surrounding predominantly a single case over twenty-one episodes. It was, I believe, the first of its kind to serialise a story over such a long run. It was far better received in the UK than the US (we, it seemed, had no problem following the long-running story back then when we only had a handful of channels available to most people). The second series, however, tried to change the format and had a number of major cases one after each other rather than one series-long case. The second series was not so well received.
The beauty of 24 was that it found a cunning way to get around this problem. While on the surface it seems to be twenty-four episodes telling one long story it isn't. The over-arcing storyline is broken down into segments of a few episode at a time. The mystery of what, say, one particular character is up to is usually resolved in a few episodes but leads to even more questions and/or crisis. There will often, however, be a single constant threat regardless and it is not until this single threat is resolved that the Day is over.
However, this series seems to have gone for a far more episodic approach under the guise of a single twenty-four hour story. I've noticed that in Day 7 the story arcs are wrapped up a lot quicker, almost to the point of being complete but for the little "twist" that leads into a new story arc while attempting to keep up the premise that there is one over-arcing story which doesn't really have the same cohesion as previous series. Whereas the others (even with the somewhat sillier story arcs) all had a sense of urgency from one to the next that made us willing to believe that all of this needed to happen within a single day. However, the urgency in the newest series seems to be forced by format and the stories could just as easily have left time for the main characters to have had a kip, grab a subways, read the paper whilst having a nice long dump, maybe even unwind a little and recuperate from their ordeals before the next part of the story was revealed. At points Battlestar Galactica and Lost may as well have been in real-time but even they managed to find enough time for the characters to conceivably eat, shit, sleep and commute individuals or information within a believable timescale.
Nuff said.
Lost
OK, so let's be blunt and say that this is the show that's really prompted this the most I think. I still watch Lost and I'm actually still enjoying it, but I'm the first to admit that things have really gotten strange(r). What started as a curious mystery has entangled itself into a labyrinth of confusion. The plot seems to be as lost as everyone else. It stopped being simply about people lost on an island a long, long time ago. Here's a simple exercise you can do to demonstrate how far off the plot Lost seems to drift from time to time.
Step One: You will need a piece of paper and a pen. On that blank piece of paper pick any spot on that page and carefully draw a single dot.
Step Two: Write underneath that dot "THE PLOT".
Step Three: Carefully fold the paper and place it into an envelope. Do not put any address or stamp on the envelope but proceed to the post-box and mail it.
Step Four: Now download the plans for a time machine and construct one.
Step Five: Travel a little to the future and write down five winning lottery numbers. Travel back a bit and win the lottery five times. Now invest everything in a bank account with a high rate of interest. Now get back into the time travel machine and travel far into the future to a point in time when we have interstellar travel. With the trillions you now have in your bank account fund the construction of the largest interstellar ship ever built with cryogenic freezers or some form of suspended animation. Lock yourself away in one of those and set the autopilot to the edge of the galaxy. Then drift out a little further into the black. If you're lucky you may have just gotten about as far from the plot as Lost.
Now, I'm sure they'll wrap things up in some ingenious way, but you really have to wonder sometimes...
Battlestar Galactica
It's quite simple:
Mini-series: Normal.
Series One: Relatively normal.
Series Two: A little strange in places but otherwise comparatively normal.
Series Three: Things are getting a bit frickin' odd now. The normal to strange ratio seems to have gone off kilter a little. Oh - no, wait - yeah, there it went just towards the end. Right off the edge there.
Series Four point zero: Do we have any superglue?
Series Four point five: Whooo-weee, you gotta try this shit, man.
People thought Farscape took a bit of a strange turn but this is a real example of strange turns. I mean, if you'd have told me way back during the miniseries what would be going on now I ... well, in truth I probably wouldn't have bothered watching it. However, that said I'm still enjoying it because it's turned out to be really good, but I have to wonder how someone can go from "man vs machine" to "man vs machine vs older machines vs "god" vs man vs um we'll think of something else - give us a mo".
Of course, I'm still hooked (I just hope I won't be bitterly disappointed by the finale).
24: Day 7
It seems crazy that they've managed to do seven series of this show. Now I know that 24 has had its ups and downs for anyone who has been watching them all. For instance, the whole Kim vs the cougar silliness in Day 2 to name but one and the many deaths of Jack Bauer in a single day with no side effects or hospitalisation to name but another. Day 1 was as near as flawless, but with each subsequent Day (series) we're asked to sustain disbelief even more and more, for example, everywhere in LA seems to be accessible in 15 minutes which anyone living in LA will tell you is a joke. It is apparently notorious for heavy traffic. Furthermore, nobody seems to need to eat, drink fluids, or go to the toilet. Such realities are sacrificed in the name of drama, however, in an effort to pack in more drama the speed at which things progress has in recent Days stretched credibility to breaking point. In the last series I remember a scene during which someone at CTU rung the president's man to update him. In almost the next breath he's walking into the president's office and gives an exposition lasting longer than the interval. Likewise paramedics seem to be hanging around on every street corner just waiting for something to do and are therefore on the scene in about -5 seconds flat. I use the negative for a very good reason. The makers of 24 play with their "real-time" very liberally these days making use of the split second between the end of one episode and the start of another to magically move the plot forward. For instance, someone could be only just shot at the end of one episode (dink-dunk-dink-dunk-cue music) and at the start of the next episode (the following takes place exactly seconds after we left off - or so we'll have you believe) the ever-present paramedics are running all over the place, police have already cordoned off the area, etc.
However, despite the ramble, it is not about this that I include 24 here. It's due to the fact that it seems that 24 has managed to do the unthinkable - it has dumbed down the real-time format.
I remember Murder One back in 1995 proved difficult for many Americans to follow considering it was predominantly a legal drama surrounding predominantly a single case over twenty-one episodes. It was, I believe, the first of its kind to serialise a story over such a long run. It was far better received in the UK than the US (we, it seemed, had no problem following the long-running story back then when we only had a handful of channels available to most people). The second series, however, tried to change the format and had a number of major cases one after each other rather than one series-long case. The second series was not so well received.
The beauty of 24 was that it found a cunning way to get around this problem. While on the surface it seems to be twenty-four episodes telling one long story it isn't. The over-arcing storyline is broken down into segments of a few episode at a time. The mystery of what, say, one particular character is up to is usually resolved in a few episodes but leads to even more questions and/or crisis. There will often, however, be a single constant threat regardless and it is not until this single threat is resolved that the Day is over.
However, this series seems to have gone for a far more episodic approach under the guise of a single twenty-four hour story. I've noticed that in Day 7 the story arcs are wrapped up a lot quicker, almost to the point of being complete but for the little "twist" that leads into a new story arc while attempting to keep up the premise that there is one over-arcing story which doesn't really have the same cohesion as previous series. Whereas the others (even with the somewhat sillier story arcs) all had a sense of urgency from one to the next that made us willing to believe that all of this needed to happen within a single day. However, the urgency in the newest series seems to be forced by format and the stories could just as easily have left time for the main characters to have had a kip, grab a subways, read the paper whilst having a nice long dump, maybe even unwind a little and recuperate from their ordeals before the next part of the story was revealed. At points Battlestar Galactica and Lost may as well have been in real-time but even they managed to find enough time for the characters to conceivably eat, shit, sleep and commute individuals or information within a believable timescale.
Nuff said.