Meanwhile…

Last night the pilot for the new HBO series, “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” premiered. It looked like a fun, charming show, so we checked it out.

The series (based on a series of books) is about Precious Ramotswe, the first (and only) female private detective in Botswana. She’s a smart, charming woman with a great eye for detail and a consuming desire to help her fellow Batswana. She’s been through some pretty devastating personal tragedies, but pulled through them all with her pride and dignity intact.

In some ways, it’s pretty standard private detective stories – in the pilot, her cases include searching for a missing child, spying on a husband, and a fraud plot.

But there are a couple of differences that make the show a lot of fun to watch. First is Precious herself. She’s the polar opposite of the standard-issue hardboiled dick you usually see in mystery stories. She’s not going to be beating information out of informants. She’s polite and compassionate. Warm and empathetic. On top of that, she’s new to the detective game. She’s learned most of what she knows from a book. There are consequences of this – she makes a critical mistake on one of the cases and it blows up in her face.

The other big difference is the setting. Botswana isn’t some steel canyon of grungy high rises punctuated with elevated trains and smog. It’s a rural society. Technology is limited. But at the same time, Botswana is a prosperous place, and there’s definitely a feel that the standard of life isn’t bad. When someone says they’re happy, you can believe it. You don’t automatically assume the authorities are corrupt or potential war criminals.

The show has a lot of humor, but they don’t shy away from the harsh realities of Africa. There are several references to the AIDS epidemic scattered throughout the show, and you know the bad guys are really bad guys. Their mobsters don’t bust your kneecaps, they kidnap your kid and use his fingers for spell components.

So I definitely recommend the show. If you’ve got HBO, I’m sure they’ll give you plenty of chances to catch up before the second episode airs on Sunday.

If I ever get out of work today, I look forward to watching the second episode of Castle tonight. If you haven’t seen Castle, it’s a cop procedural starring Nathan Fillion. Fillion plays a mystery writer who tags along with a tough-as-nails police detective as she works her cases. The show really rides on Fillion’s charm and personality, and it seems as though the part was tailor made for him. It’s not going to change the face of television or anything, but it’s cute and there’s nothing else on Mondays anyway.

At any rate, it makes me think about how many times I’ve written stories just to play around with a character, fashioning stories around the protagonist. I would say that’s usually how I write. I’ll some up with what seems like a fun idea for a personality, then build a world necessary for that person to exist, and the story (I hope) falls into place after that. The character isn’t necessarily well developed at first, but there’s usually enough to get started. Once you’ve tossed them into a difficult situation, I have to hope that I’ve figured out how they’ll cope under pressure, and that along the way I can develop them into someone who is interesting not just to me, but the reader. The process probably isn’t unlike that of writing a part for a particular actor.

Unfortunately, it means I tend to have trouble coming up with good plots. Take “Apotheosis Cake,” (if you haven’t read it, cruise on over to the Publications page for a link) for example. I came up with what I thought was a pretty wonderful character in Jennifer, the narrator. She had a fun voice and an outlook on life that was both unique and instantly identifiable. The whole story hinges on her wit, and I think it mostly works. But since there’s not really much plot there, the story probably falls a little flat at the end. I’m still working on striking that balance.

It makes me wonder what it’s like for those writers lucky enough adapt a pre-established story for television or movie – they essentially get to write a story for their character for an actor.

This is just a long-winded way of saying to stay tuned for the 2018 release of Shades of Red, starring Summer Glau as the Scarlet Ranger.

Wow. So lately the wife and I have been watching random episodes of “Law & Order.” It’s always interesting to study something that is so immensely successful. It’s somewhat painful, given that the shows we typically fall in love with so often get cancelled long before their time. But nonetheless, I think it’s valuable to study the types of storytelling that seem to garner such enormous audiences.

L&O seems to have a number of strengths:

• Simple  characters – They follow a pretty basic white-hat/black-hat pattern. The cops are righteous and honest. The prosecutors are determined and competent. (I won’t go into some rant about how completely unrealistic that is.) They do have to sometime make tough decisions, but the motives are always pure. It’s fascinating how long actors will stay on that show, some of them for over a decade, but at the same time they people they portray are pretty interchangeable. Also, if you are a female lawyer, you are hot.

• No story arcs – as far as I can tell, every episode is done-in-one, that is, the mystery is completed in one episode. L&O vets could probably point out exceptions, as I’m sure they’ve probably done two-parters before. You can pick any episode out of any season and watch it without worrying about some crucial plot point or character development. Because there isn’t any. (Come to think of it, “Star Trek: The Next Generation” was much the same way, only occasionally referring to previous stories or featuring recurring characters, and often what seems like a dramatic character epiphany or growth was forgotten a week later.)

To me this is almost blasphemous. It’s a waste of the real strength of TV, the serial story. Shows like The Shield, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Battlestar Galactica, Babylon 5, and Deep Space 9 took full advantage of the serial aspect of television. The actors grew into their characters. The characters could be given long-lasting changes to their motives and personality. The producers can introduce plot elements in a subtle fashion, planting seeds for future stories sometimes several seasons in advance. It requires committment, sure, but the payoff can be extraordinarily satisfying. Do you want to start watching mid-season? Of course not, but in this age of easily-accessable TV on DVD, there’s really no excuse not to be caught up.

Clearly, however, it has worked for L&O, so I’m probably just talking out of my ass.

• By extension of the previous two points, there’s this powerful revelation: you can start watching any given episode at any point and be caught up in five minutes or less. Missed the first half hour of the show? Who cares? You’ll be fine. Just wait a tic, and the DAs will summarize everything up to that point. It’s the ultimate in impulse television. By contrast, if you missed the first five minutes of an episode of Babylon 5, you could write off the rest of the season. And back then there was no DVD to run to.

None of this is meant as a slight – L&O and its various and sundry spin-offs is perfectly entertaining television. In fact, the little I’ve watched of SVU indicates that it actually does use the serial nature of television more to its advantage, with overarcing character development. And I have a great deal of respect for the writing pit crew, who must have a hell of a time coming up with a fresh mystery every week. I just thought it was interesting to note some of the facets of the show that I think contribute to their success.

I’m not sure what the lesson should be for prose writers, but there’s got to be one in there somewhere. And it’s probably depressing.

Friend Meng will be on Jeopardy today! Crazy! Check it out!

So HBO’s new vampire series, True Blood, premiered last night. You can read friend Erin’s reaction here.

It’s funny, I had the exact opposite reaction to it than she did.

I couldn’t connect or care about any of the characters and the setting did nothing for me. I found the feisty friend to be over the top, and the general scum-baggery nature of almost every single person in the show was a turn off. The script was meh.

The premise of the show is that vampires have been “outed” to the general public. Everyone knows about them. A synthetic blood has been created that is supposed to make them palatable (ahem) to normal human society. Presumably, with this “True Blood” drink, vampires can live among us without the need to consume their still-living neighbors. Even the characters in the show express some doubt at that idea.

To me, the problem with this is that vampires are still monsters. They are unequivocally evil. So the parallel to whatever civil rights movement you might want to allude to kind of falls apart. Furthermore, vampires are seen as desirable and cool.

I watched one of those “behind the scenes” specials just before the show and I don’t think I’ve ever heard the word “metaphor” spoken so many times in 20 minutes. I found this irritating primarily because it’s so obvious; of course monsters are metaphors. They always have been. Whether it’s a giant killer robot, zombies, werewolves, irradiated ants, or alien invaders, they all represent some facet of the human condition. It’s what you do with the metaphor that counts. Vampires are a bit unique in that they are remarkably versatile; immortality, death, hunger, all sorts of potential uses for them. For True Blood, they kept pounding in the idea that vampirism is a metphor for sex.

That’s fine (though I’d say Buffy, which was completely left out of the special’s account of the history of modern vampire myth, already did it years ago, and I’m sure they weren’t the first). The opening hook features a guy getting a handjob in the car when he excitedly notices a passing store sells True Blood. Later we’re introduced to a couple of vampire fetishists and a brutal tape of a vamp having sex. There was no subtlety to it whatsoever.

So given the celebrity status of vampires in the show, am I to conclude that serial rapists and murderers are desirable and cool? I guess there is some potential satire and social commentary there, but that’s been done before, too, and it wasn’t all that interesting then, either.

I wasn’t really seeing any layers beyond those two surface-level items, which is another mark against it.

But, like I said, Erin, who is way more into vampires than I am and probably better versed in the modern vamp mythology, liked it quite a bit. I also only watched half the episode, so feel free to take my opinion with a grain of salt. But based on what I saw, it’s not a fictional universe in which I’m interested.

Well, the writer’s strike has certainly made a mess of television, eh? I totally support the screenwriters in this, but it is kind of a bummer. Stuff like the Daily Show will bounce back just fine, but it’s the dramas and other stories that will seriously suffer. Will there ever be more Scrubs? Probably not, since this was the last season anyway. Will Battlestar Galactica get to finish their last season? Who knows? That’s especially frustrating–it would be like if Babylon 5 suddenly ended halfway through the fourth season.

It’ll be most interesting to see how things affect film. Movie companies have hundreds of scripts laying around, so it’ll take a while. But with nothing new being produced, this may be a chance for the independent movies, free of union rules, to shine. We might actually see better movies as a result of the strike. Won’t those guild writer’s faces be red!

Anyway, here’s a few things I’ve watched lately and what I thought of them.
Continue reading

Last night I got to see an advance screening of the new Battlestar Galactica movie (long episode, whatever you want to call it). In a theater and everything! It was awesome on pretty much every level, much like the rest of the series. BSG in general almost always hits every beat it needs to–I’m disturbed when I need to be disturbed, inspired when I need to be (even the terrifying Admiral Cain’s speeches get the blood stirring, which is a testament to Michelle Forbes), terrified when I need to be, and so on.

BSG’s biggest strength is the characters. They’re believable, they’re terribly flawed but likable, and every one has a tragedy in their life beyond the obvious one that their civilization has been all but obliterated. People screw up as often as they succeed, and sometimes make bad choices and have to deal with the consequences. That may sound like a trifle, but in most serial storytelling, massive events are minimized in order to keep the status quo (and there are good reasons for it, but I won’t go into that).

The lesson to take from BSG? When you create your characters, make them interesting people first. Kara Thrace, Starbuck, is a stubborn, grouchy, alcoholic with serious authority issues stemming from a bad relationship with her mother. She works and plays hard, and can become deeply passionate about something once she focuses in on it. Into this unlikely figure is poured the responsibility of being either the savior or destroyer of humanity (that’s still up in the air). Oh, yeah, and she’s a crack fighter pilot and a woman, too. Those last items definitely inform the character and how she’s written, but they’re the most broad categories and least interesting.

Let’s compare her to the current Jaime Sommers, the Bionic Woman. Poor Jaime is a good example of someone who was written the opposite way. They started with a woman, then added a few cybernetic parts. She doesn’t have a terribly unique voice or background. They gave her what could be an interesting situation, having to raise a younger sister by herself, but we don’t really get to see how it’s affected her besides having to come up with awkward excuses for why she’s out so late. Her dialog, sadly, isn’t clever. She works for a shady and loosely defined government organization with limitless resources. Who doesn’t? The only thing about Jaime stand out from the crowd is her bionic implants, but those are primarily just used as plot devices. [Resists urge to make joke about implants in Hollywood--whew] So in the end, Jaime ends up coming off as just bland.

It’s interesting, because the two shows share a producer in Don Eick. You have to wonder what happened.

I guess my point is that when you really sit down to start fleshing out the character, you need to go straight for the most specific details you can. If your hero is the only person in three counties who can skin a potato in under an hour, start with that. There’s nothing wrong with starting with sex, but make sure there’s something interesting about the fact that your hero is a particular gender (or race, even), and it’s not just a flip of the coin.

I dunno, this is all pretty obvious, I guess. I think I’m mostly just working out for myself why “Bionic Woman” is such a failure when it should have been good. Carry on, nothing to see here.