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Words worth a thousand pictures
I’ve been reading Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere recently – fulfilling my duties as both a Sandman devotee and a literary Chicagoan, since the book is April’s selection in our Public Library’s “One Book, One Chicago” program. As any Gaiman reader would expect, the story is propulsive and chock-full of rich world-building and encyclopedic literary allusions. But at times, I feel like the strictures of prose lead to pitfalls that a comic book would skip over: some of the characterizations are a bit too on-the-nose, and descriptive passages occasionally lean on triteness.
And then I come across a passage like this one (which I quote here without context in order to prevent spoilage):
“The marquis felt, then, that much of what he had gone through in the previous week was made up for by the expression on Hunter’s face.”
Only pure prose can render that moment so perfectly. In a comic book, the expression on Hunter’s face would have to be drawn by an artist, who interprets the meaning of the sentence and the scene a certain way. The reader’s interpretation of that drawing may, in turn, diverge from the artist’s intent, but will nevertheless be restricted to the range of emotions conveyed by a particular physical image.
As it stands, that passage encapsulates the competitive advantage of a verbal medium. By relying on the limitless malleability of language, Gaiman allows every reader to process the meaning in her own way. In that sentence, Hunter’s expression might be one of anger, shock, bemusement, respect, relief, astonishment, joy, disbelief. It might contain any combination of those emotions. So it contains all of them, while stating none of them. It’s a Schrödinger paradox of a sentence. It forces the reader to do a bit of work, to invest himself in a way that a visual medium cannot.
ATTENTION STARZ: I have your next historical-but-not-really drama right here
Followers of my Twitter feed will not be surprised to learn that I’ve been brushing up on my mythology – specifically, Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, a sort of greatest-hits compilation of the gods and heroes of Greek, Roman, and Norse legend. What remains striking about virtually every one isn’t what they reveal about the values and mentalities of antiquity so much as what they reveal about timeless human nature. This isn’t a terribly original observation, but it’s true: the roots of all storytelling are here.
Anyway, the one I’m really loving, one of the preeminent stories of its time but lesser known today, is the saga of Theseus. He was Athens’s greatest hero, and dude was a straight-up knight of the realm: brave, just, and wise. And his story would make for a pretty kick-ass graphic novel or 13-episode TV series.
The details in most myths are fungible, stemming from an oral tradition written down by a handful of poets sometimes centuries after they originated. So the plot descriptions herein come from Hamilton’s volume; other versions may vary in certain particulars. But check out some of these TV-ready story elements:
Weekend Round-up
My brief thoughts on Thursday’s NBC comedies, including:
A very funny but slightly disjointed Community, “Competitive Wine Tasting;”
A ho-hum The Office, “Training Day,” that coasts on the wattage of guest star Will Ferrell;
And a superlative Parks and Recreation, “Fancy Party,” which solidifies its place as my favorite show on the air.
I also beseech America to watch Cougar Town, an under-appreciated comic gem which returns from hiatus this week (reviews to follow Monday’s and Wednesday’s episodes).
Dispatches from my TV criticism
Over at The Vast Wasteland, I have reviews up of some of this week’s new programs:
Celebrity Apprentice, “Australian Gold,” in which Gary Busey is on everyone’s last nerve, except for the NBC ad sales department.
How I Met Your Mother, “The Exploding Meatball Sub,” in which the frustrating outweighed the funny.
The Chicago Code, “Wild Onions,” in which a series of vignette-style stories shed some light on partnerships old and new.
Modern Family, “The Musical Man,” in which the show coasts on a contrived plot and some overly-familiar gags.
Justified, “Debts and Accounts,” in which one of the most grippingly written and acted seasons of TV continues apace.
And from last week, my Q&A with fantasy author/former Buffy star Amber Benson.
Sports Night Revisited, Episodes 12-13: In which a love triangle becomes a love rhombus
Season 1, Episodes 12-13: “Smoky,” “Small Town”
A good story works its way into your system. But every fiction fan has a few immunities, aesthetic antibodies that will always reject a certain storytelling strain – a particular genre, character type, plot device, whatever – notwithstanding the quality of its execution. You might be congenitally incapable of enjoying a conspiracy plot, or a brooding bad boy character, or anything remotely science fiction-y, no matter how skillfully or originally it’s handled. That’s a normal aspect of fandom.
I think that’s why “will they/won’t they?” relationships just don’t register with me. To me, this sort of storyline is only able to sustain dramatic momentum by relying on behavior that ranges from implausible to baffling. Do people often behave in implausible and baffling ways, especially when addled by the hormone charge of attraction? Sure. Again, this sentiment isn’t rooted in dispassionate criticism, nor could I fairly say that exceptions don’t or can’t exist. But as a rule of thumb, an extended will they/won’t they story is likely to bounce off me like a Nerf pellet.
Platonic can be ideal
I’ve been trying to gather my thoughts for the next installment of my Sports Night retrospective, which I think will begin to tackle the will-they/won’t-they/but-it’s-TV-so-of-fucking-course-they-will relationship between Dana and Casey. It’s a dynamic that never worked for me, and one reason why is that it felt so forced. The show tells us that Dana and Casey have been friends for 15 years, but never gives a second’s thought to the notion that being great friends could be enough.
It irks me how often TV shows imply that a close relationship between a male and a female can’t be valid or satisfying unless it leads to romantic entanglement, or sexual tension. I’m watching Friday Night Lights for the first time, and I was thinking about this while watching that show’s handling of Tyra and Landry in season two. (SPOILERS AHEAD after the jump.)
Sports Night Revisited, Episodes 8-11: Drama is easy, dramedy is hard
Season 1, Episodes 8-11: “Thespis,” “The Quality of Mercy At 29K,” “Shoe Money Tonight,” “The Six Southern Gentlemen of Tennessee Tech”
When a friend of mine first started watching The West Wing, he remarked to me that he was surprised how funny it was. For a lofty political drama – which frequently discussed economic crises, capital punishment, and nuclear disarmament – it devoted a great percentage of its screen time to comedic scenes and side plots. The West Wing, winner of four straight Emmys for Oustanding Dramatic Series, was also one of the funniest prime time shows of its era.
This approach was hardly unheard-of; a number of contemporary dramas also mixed in a heaping helping of humor, including Gilmore Girls, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and Veronica Mars. Indeed, most dramatic series try to leaven the weekly tension with a quip here, a comic-relief secondary character there. And, for the most part, audiences accept and expect this.
Sports Night Revisited, Episodes 5-7: The best of times, the worst of times for Sorkin’s leading women
Season 1, Episodes 5-7: “Mary Pat Shelby,” “The Head Coach, Dinner and The Morning Mail,” “Dear Louise…”
As far as Internet truisms go, “Aaron Sorkin can’t write women,” is right up there with “Never start a land war in Asia.”
I haven’t always understood this criticism; I see it more clearly on the fringes of his work. You can tell Sorkin wants to write powerful, independent women with strengths and foibles and motivations. He has an idea of what they’re supposed to look like. It’s just that a lot of times, the traits he’s trying to imbue get lost in translation. At worst, this results in the caricaturish Lt. Cdr. JoAnn Galloway in A Few Good Men, who comes across as shrill and over-matched at nearly every turn (at least based on Demi Moore’s portrayal in the film version; I’ve never seen any stage productions). On the other hand, Annette Bening’s formidable lobbyist-cum-presidential-paramour in The American President is well-rounded and engaging, with entirely believable moments of strength and weakness. (Of course, it’s fair to ask how much of the disparity here is due to the relative acting talents of Moore and Bening.)
Sports Night makes a conscious effort to present two female characters in positions of authority. As, respectively, the producer and senior associate producer of Sports Night, Dana Whitaker and Natalie Hurley are drawn as smart, successful women in the traditionally male-centric world of sports journalism. The challenges faced by women in this particular profession (no less today than in 1998, sadly) are arguably greater than in any other consumer industry. Those challenges form the wellspring of the main story in “Mary Pat Shelby,” a story which continues – and is disappointingly squandered – in “The Head Coach, Dinner and The Morning Mail.”
Sports Night: Revisited – The first in an occasional series
One of the highlights of my dull and dispiriting summer of 2001 was falling for Aaron Sorkin’s Sports Night. I can’t remember if I watched the show during its initial two-season run on ABC in 1998-2000, but it didn’t make an impression on me until I began watching the endless midday repeats on Comedy Central during those barren weeks spent at home from college.
I feel like the show is often dismissed these days when it’s thought of at all. It’s either overshadowed by Sorkin’s far more successful (and superior) follow-up The West Wing, or pointed to as the first warning sign of the faults and excesses his detractors would come to loathe. So since I’ve been meaning to try my hand at television criticism for some time, I figured I would revisit one of my old favorites with a more critical eye.
I’ll be working through the 45-episode series in blocks of three or four episodes at a time, grouping them by story arcs as much as possible, but primarily focusing on a couple of overarching themes. I’m not going to spend a lot of time recapping plots or identifying major characters except when necessary, but I’ll try to make the discussions accessible to anyone with at least a surface knowledge of the show.
Finally, a style note: In order to distinguish between the show we’re watching from the eponymous show-within-the-show the characters are producing, I’ll refer to the former in the traditional mode of italics, Sports Night, and the latter in plain text, Sports Night.
With that in mind, off we go. One fan’s reappraisal of Sports Night, ten years later, beginning at the beginning:
The Office waves the white flag by bringing in Will Ferrell
Perhaps proving that I am well on my way to stuffy ol’ adulthood, I was more perplexed than pleased by the news of Will Ferrell’s four-episode guest spot on The Office. Ferrell will appear during the story arc that sees off Michael Scott, adding some seemingly redundant hoopla to what was already going to be the highly publicized event of Steve Carell’s exit from the show.
Ferrell will appear not only in Carell’s final episode but in one more after that. It’s hard to see this as anything other than a panic move. Stunt casting of this magnitude can’t help but create the impression that the producers don’t have much faith in the show’s ability to hold an audience once Michael Scott isn’t at its center. That may or may not be true, but it’s absolutely the message they (or NBC) are sending. Unfortunately it’s one I happen to agree with.
Andrea Pallas Daglas 