Cake, or death? Cake, please
Sep. 29th, 2004 08:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwynGetting all 13 episodes of Keen Eddie on nice shiny DVDs is a little like those classic choice scenarios where you really have no choice. You can have the episodes on disc, preserved in beautiful picture forever (or at least until new technology becomes standard and/or laser rot proves to be more than an urban myth), but you have to accept them without the original music in many of the best scenes, and you have to watch them all out of order. So, cake or death? Which will it be? Of course any true fan chooses to have them even without the music. But for anyone who's already fallen in love with the show, it becomes painful to watch some of the episodes. And it's impossible to review the discs without focusing on this.
So far, most of the TV shows that have come out on DVD have included the original incidental music used in the original airings. The notable exception is the Wiseguy first season, first arc discs, where The Moody Blues' Nights in White Satin, which played a pivotal role in the mood of the denouement of the Steelgrave arc, was replaced because the licensing rights were too extreme for the producers to pay for. For non-fans, it may not have as big of an impact, but let's face it: most of the people who buy DVD sets are already fans of these shows. Yes, many people are introduced to shows by watching them this way, but I'd argue that by and large, the majority of those folks are renting the seasons through Netflix or other sources, not buying them first without being familiar with it. So KE fans are going to feel the loss of "One Step Beyond" in the foot chase sequence of the pilot, or Hendrix's "Rock Star" in the Bentley episode, and so on, but the newbies, probably not so much.
The way music companies have treated the licensing issue is apalling, and I'm baffled by why entertainment media have never delved into this issue -- it's the licensing that is keeping many shows on the shelf, or stalling releases like with La Femme Nikita, and the music companies set heinously high fees when TV shows first started coming out on DVD in their panic about the new medium. The fact that shows are becoming a huge marketing success and bringing people into new music appears to have been lost on them, and KE seems like a great example of how ridiculous the licensing burden is to studios. Paramount decided that the show was worth releasing in its too-early-cancelled entirety, but not worthy enough for them to do anything but provide the barest of bones incidentals. And the show is in many ways the poorer for it, because Daniel Ash/Orbital did some great things with the show's main music, but those incidental songs were often so well-chosen as to become part of the storyline. With the Bentley sequence, it's really clear that the whole driving-around-London segment was edited to Jimi Hendrix's song, and the new generic music doesn't fit any of the edits or the style of the sequence.
Gone, too, are more subtle choices like much of the cool, jazzy electronica stuff that often played over the romantic attraction scenes between Eddie and Fiona. The producers had interesting, varied, and wonderfully discriminating taste in music, and it elevated much of the writing in many ways as a sort of gentle coda. I used to think that I'd be desperate enough to get shows such as LFN and Miami Vice and so on without the original music if it meant having good viddable copies, but the KE experience has left me a little less eager for that. The good part is that we have the episodes uncut, and they do look wonderful -- no artifacting, no digital dragging or blurring, the colors are bright and clear, the detail is fabulous and the sound is excellent -- with no station ID bugs, no commercials, etc. But unfortunately, an aspect of the show has been completely excised as if it didn't matter, because the studio believed there was not enough of an audience to pay the extra money for song licensing.
Interestingly, the "covers" of songs done just for the show, such as "In Crowd" and "Sugar, Sugar" are still there, and they do seem willing to pay for those, so I almost wonder why they couldn't have found generic covers of the songs they cut. Not that this would have helped, but... at least the way sequences are edited, things might not have been so noticeable. I like Paramount's phrasing, too -- "Music has been replaced for this home theatre edition." As if you're getting special treatment you should be happy about! At least, thank god, they do leave in the real version of Duran Duran's "Hungry Like the Wolf" in Citizen Cecil, because without that, the entire joke of robbers wearing Duran Duran masks would fall utterly flat. But it's odd that that's the only song they felt compelled to keep.
Paramount's lack of faith in the discs also shows in the lack of extras. I do love the fact that they provde the play all feature that the LFN and many other DVDs do, because I despise having to page through multiple menus the way the Buffy/Angel/Firefly discs force me to. And I liked the packaging -- bright neon colors with jazzy graphics that mimic the feel of the show and its Guy Ritchie-style, herky jerky editing -- and the fact that the four discs come in individual thin cases in a slipcase, like Firefly, rather than those frustrating, infuriating pullout boxes like Fox uses. But there are no booklets, no information, not even a list of what order the episodes should be viewed in to see the story as it unfolds more properly.
At least they used the original Fox airing schedule, so that Horse Heir is second, because much of the show subsequently takes place in the pub featured in that episode, and when Bravo ran all 13 eps, they showed Horse Heir last, which was bizarre. Admittedly, it's a challenging ep for most people -- nearly everyone I pimped into watching the show after the pilot tuned in to see that one, and was forever turned off the show after that. It's definitely the most vulgar and offensive of the episodes, but it does set up recurring characters, so having it play second is relatively important. (And apparently, according to TVTome, it enraged the FCC, it was so vulgar.) But the big problem is that Fox never aired many of the earliest eps, and Bravo tacked most of them on at the end when they played the full schedule, so we still get early storylines building up the relationships of Eddie and Pippin, Eddie and Fiona, and Eddie and Nathaniel so late in the game it seems odd.
I think that last part is key, because the show really is about relationships in many respects. What made KE so charming and unusual was that it upended expectations of both the fish out of water stories we're used to and tweaked character stereotypes -- it's not the NYC cop who's the lewd sex fiend, it's the supposedly classy Englishman. It's not the Englishman who's kind and polite, it's the NYC cop. This was for me the biggest delight of the series -- that Eddie was a very humanistic guy, even while being a total NYC blowhard tough guy. He is told at one point that he is a rare cop with a soul, and each episode finds a way to prove that -- he's both dumb and clever, tough and tender, clueless and witty, and this gives him a character quite unlike any other on TV. As well, Monty Pippin is possibly the oddest character ever to grace the small screen, and his crushing on Eddie, as well as his ridiculous sexual escapades, made for some very unusual humor.
Aside from making sense out of Monty's ever-changing hairstyle, watching the eps in order would help alleviate some of that off-kilterness in the roommate situation with Fiona. It was clear they wanted to build that as a love-hate relationship in the Moonlighting style, but because of the messiness of airing, it often seems just bizarre and Fiona comes across as such a hostile, schizoid bitch that we lose a lot of the more interesting qualities she had. I especially love the episode where everyone is experiencing weird things because of a full moon, when Fiona and Eddie are acting kindly toward each other but can't figure out why. But seeing it at the end throws the story out of whack a bit.
So, sadly, though I usually get rid of my tapes once I've got things on DVD, I feel the need to keep my SVHS tapes of the Bravo airings, just so I can show folks how clever the music use was, and preserve some sense of how engaging the show was with it. And at some point, when I've had breathing space, I plan to sit down and watch the episodes in the order they were meant to be seen, instead of Paramount's cheap-ass slap-dash approach. Even though the series was cancelled and dumped on by Fox, the interest Bravo showed, and the fact that there was enough interest in having it on DVD, would have seemed like a no-brainer for a better package for this unusual, delightful series. It's too bad Paramount has always been running behind other studios in the TV shows on DVD race, because they clearly don't get what the full package can do for a series in its new life on disc. But here's hoping for discovery by more people now that it is out, even if they will miss the full experience of such a hip, fun, and lovely series.
ETA: I believe this is the original order of the episodes as they were conceived:
Pilot
Horse Heir
Keeping Up Appearances
Citzen Cecil
Who Wants to Be in a Club That Would Have Me As a Member?
Sucker Punch
Black Like Me
Inciting Incident
Achtung, Baby
The Amazing Larry Dunn
Sticky Fingers
Eddie Loves Baseball
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite
So far, most of the TV shows that have come out on DVD have included the original incidental music used in the original airings. The notable exception is the Wiseguy first season, first arc discs, where The Moody Blues' Nights in White Satin, which played a pivotal role in the mood of the denouement of the Steelgrave arc, was replaced because the licensing rights were too extreme for the producers to pay for. For non-fans, it may not have as big of an impact, but let's face it: most of the people who buy DVD sets are already fans of these shows. Yes, many people are introduced to shows by watching them this way, but I'd argue that by and large, the majority of those folks are renting the seasons through Netflix or other sources, not buying them first without being familiar with it. So KE fans are going to feel the loss of "One Step Beyond" in the foot chase sequence of the pilot, or Hendrix's "Rock Star" in the Bentley episode, and so on, but the newbies, probably not so much.
The way music companies have treated the licensing issue is apalling, and I'm baffled by why entertainment media have never delved into this issue -- it's the licensing that is keeping many shows on the shelf, or stalling releases like with La Femme Nikita, and the music companies set heinously high fees when TV shows first started coming out on DVD in their panic about the new medium. The fact that shows are becoming a huge marketing success and bringing people into new music appears to have been lost on them, and KE seems like a great example of how ridiculous the licensing burden is to studios. Paramount decided that the show was worth releasing in its too-early-cancelled entirety, but not worthy enough for them to do anything but provide the barest of bones incidentals. And the show is in many ways the poorer for it, because Daniel Ash/Orbital did some great things with the show's main music, but those incidental songs were often so well-chosen as to become part of the storyline. With the Bentley sequence, it's really clear that the whole driving-around-London segment was edited to Jimi Hendrix's song, and the new generic music doesn't fit any of the edits or the style of the sequence.
Gone, too, are more subtle choices like much of the cool, jazzy electronica stuff that often played over the romantic attraction scenes between Eddie and Fiona. The producers had interesting, varied, and wonderfully discriminating taste in music, and it elevated much of the writing in many ways as a sort of gentle coda. I used to think that I'd be desperate enough to get shows such as LFN and Miami Vice and so on without the original music if it meant having good viddable copies, but the KE experience has left me a little less eager for that. The good part is that we have the episodes uncut, and they do look wonderful -- no artifacting, no digital dragging or blurring, the colors are bright and clear, the detail is fabulous and the sound is excellent -- with no station ID bugs, no commercials, etc. But unfortunately, an aspect of the show has been completely excised as if it didn't matter, because the studio believed there was not enough of an audience to pay the extra money for song licensing.
Interestingly, the "covers" of songs done just for the show, such as "In Crowd" and "Sugar, Sugar" are still there, and they do seem willing to pay for those, so I almost wonder why they couldn't have found generic covers of the songs they cut. Not that this would have helped, but... at least the way sequences are edited, things might not have been so noticeable. I like Paramount's phrasing, too -- "Music has been replaced for this home theatre edition." As if you're getting special treatment you should be happy about! At least, thank god, they do leave in the real version of Duran Duran's "Hungry Like the Wolf" in Citizen Cecil, because without that, the entire joke of robbers wearing Duran Duran masks would fall utterly flat. But it's odd that that's the only song they felt compelled to keep.
Paramount's lack of faith in the discs also shows in the lack of extras. I do love the fact that they provde the play all feature that the LFN and many other DVDs do, because I despise having to page through multiple menus the way the Buffy/Angel/Firefly discs force me to. And I liked the packaging -- bright neon colors with jazzy graphics that mimic the feel of the show and its Guy Ritchie-style, herky jerky editing -- and the fact that the four discs come in individual thin cases in a slipcase, like Firefly, rather than those frustrating, infuriating pullout boxes like Fox uses. But there are no booklets, no information, not even a list of what order the episodes should be viewed in to see the story as it unfolds more properly.
At least they used the original Fox airing schedule, so that Horse Heir is second, because much of the show subsequently takes place in the pub featured in that episode, and when Bravo ran all 13 eps, they showed Horse Heir last, which was bizarre. Admittedly, it's a challenging ep for most people -- nearly everyone I pimped into watching the show after the pilot tuned in to see that one, and was forever turned off the show after that. It's definitely the most vulgar and offensive of the episodes, but it does set up recurring characters, so having it play second is relatively important. (And apparently, according to TVTome, it enraged the FCC, it was so vulgar.) But the big problem is that Fox never aired many of the earliest eps, and Bravo tacked most of them on at the end when they played the full schedule, so we still get early storylines building up the relationships of Eddie and Pippin, Eddie and Fiona, and Eddie and Nathaniel so late in the game it seems odd.
I think that last part is key, because the show really is about relationships in many respects. What made KE so charming and unusual was that it upended expectations of both the fish out of water stories we're used to and tweaked character stereotypes -- it's not the NYC cop who's the lewd sex fiend, it's the supposedly classy Englishman. It's not the Englishman who's kind and polite, it's the NYC cop. This was for me the biggest delight of the series -- that Eddie was a very humanistic guy, even while being a total NYC blowhard tough guy. He is told at one point that he is a rare cop with a soul, and each episode finds a way to prove that -- he's both dumb and clever, tough and tender, clueless and witty, and this gives him a character quite unlike any other on TV. As well, Monty Pippin is possibly the oddest character ever to grace the small screen, and his crushing on Eddie, as well as his ridiculous sexual escapades, made for some very unusual humor.
Aside from making sense out of Monty's ever-changing hairstyle, watching the eps in order would help alleviate some of that off-kilterness in the roommate situation with Fiona. It was clear they wanted to build that as a love-hate relationship in the Moonlighting style, but because of the messiness of airing, it often seems just bizarre and Fiona comes across as such a hostile, schizoid bitch that we lose a lot of the more interesting qualities she had. I especially love the episode where everyone is experiencing weird things because of a full moon, when Fiona and Eddie are acting kindly toward each other but can't figure out why. But seeing it at the end throws the story out of whack a bit.
So, sadly, though I usually get rid of my tapes once I've got things on DVD, I feel the need to keep my SVHS tapes of the Bravo airings, just so I can show folks how clever the music use was, and preserve some sense of how engaging the show was with it. And at some point, when I've had breathing space, I plan to sit down and watch the episodes in the order they were meant to be seen, instead of Paramount's cheap-ass slap-dash approach. Even though the series was cancelled and dumped on by Fox, the interest Bravo showed, and the fact that there was enough interest in having it on DVD, would have seemed like a no-brainer for a better package for this unusual, delightful series. It's too bad Paramount has always been running behind other studios in the TV shows on DVD race, because they clearly don't get what the full package can do for a series in its new life on disc. But here's hoping for discovery by more people now that it is out, even if they will miss the full experience of such a hip, fun, and lovely series.
ETA: I believe this is the original order of the episodes as they were conceived:
Pilot
Horse Heir
Keeping Up Appearances
Citzen Cecil
Who Wants to Be in a Club That Would Have Me As a Member?
Sucker Punch
Black Like Me
Inciting Incident
Achtung, Baby
The Amazing Larry Dunn
Sticky Fingers
Eddie Loves Baseball
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite
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no subject
Date: 2004-09-29 10:22 am (UTC)I wasn't put off by Horse Heir, but then my first episode was 'Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite' which I thought was one of the finest out of all of them. The mad Frenchman won me over, especially the scene where he's got that chart and the colors are swirling all around over his face.
I'm upset at the loss of the music, though. That is disheartening, but as I've only seen 3/4 of the episodes and most of them only once, I may not even notice a difference.
no subject
Date: 2004-09-29 10:35 am (UTC)I loved KE, my dad loved KE, and most people I knew just scratched their heads and thought it was "weird." Pfft.
In other news, I'm about 100 pages in to The Key Watcher/Dark Haven series and LOVING IT. I'm not particularly a Giles fan, so I wasn't sure it would work for me, but I really do like it. It's very well-written, it weaves the two universes together in a way that makes a lot of sense, and though Giles and Dawn have changed a lot, I still recognize them.
I think TK's real strength is her Anita-verse. I just ordered Incubus Dreams, but got it with free shipping and the other item with it won't be available for a couple of weeks, so it may be mid-October before I get to read it. In the meantime, this story is totally satisfying my Anita jones. :)
Thanks VERY much for the rec.
no subject
Date: 2004-09-29 01:23 pm (UTC)It was Meg who recommended this story, not you, but hey, I still say it's good.
I tried for almost an hour to remember and figure out which one of you it was, and I picked wrong! Nuts!
no subject
Date: 2004-09-30 08:27 am (UTC)The whole issue with music licensing - baffling! You would think that it would be a win/win situation, that everyone involved would *want* to make money... ::shakes head in disgust::
On the quality side, I was able to get the lfn s2 dvds, and this is where I really start shaking my head in disgust. Typos? A booklet, yes, but could they size the font any larger and say any less? Could they use the same picture over again a few more times? Could the gag real be any shorter? (as treasure-full as it is!)Could they really find so few extras to include? We are so hungry for the product that we end up being thrilled just to get any part of it at all, and forgive all the rest of the bungling. (At least I am...) You see Michael in digital perfection and forget all the rest. Wait, what was I talking about?
no subject
Date: 2004-10-01 11:38 pm (UTC)