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gwynI am watching a LOT of TV. With the three free months of HBO, Starz, and Showtime, I've managed to get close to maxing out my HD tifaux, and I have to watch my regular network stuff in order to keep making room for more movies to pile up that I can watch when the three free months run out. Not to complain or anything, since really, I love TV.
My big problem is that a lot of the things I love have really disappointed me lately (Life, you're on notice!), some for a long time (BSG, I'm looking at you!), and I liked what![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sherrold said when I was describing how BSG had jumped the shark for me a long time ago and I didn't know why I was watching it other than to see how it finally ends: "It's just there." I prefer to be excited by new episodes, myself, rather than watch because they are there.
So with needing more new stimulus, I decided to try two new series that premiered this month: Lie to Me and Trust Me.
You know, most of the time, a bad show is just... a bad show. Sometimes I can even get behind the bad or cliched show if the dialog is witty enough or the characters are fun enough: this would pretty much encompass anything I watch on CBS, because none of those shows are intellectually challenging or emotionally engaging or creatively entertaining. In fact, just about everything on it, even my beloved Flashpoint, Mentalist, and Numb3rs, rely heavily on plots they've recycled from 1970s dramas they picked up on TVLand. I would defy anyone to randomly pick an episode of Adam-12 or Marcus Welby or MacMillan and Wife and not be able to match it up, complete with middlebrow-safe dialog, to an existing CBS show plotline. Which is okay, especially when you have characters like the emotionally damaged yet twinkly Patrick Jane, or the uberclam carries the weight of the world on his shoulders Don Eppes, or sexy but suffering supersniper Ed Lane. (I can't even count how many CBS procedurals still rely on this trope of how dangerous and scary and pervy the Internets are: hello, 1997, your scare tactics are calling.)
What isn't okay is when you throw all the cliches in a blender and put some high production values and elegant glittering modern sets and hire high-profile or journeyman TV actors to spew your recycled expository lowbrow-safe dialog and call it a hot new show, the way Lie to Me and Trust Me have done. Trust Me was just annoying; Lie to Me flat-out offended me because it wastes an incredibly talented actor, Tim Roth, by not only completely castrating him, but forcing him into a role that couldn't possibly be more wrong for his style and personality. And I tuned into it largely to see him, but he's saddled with (though he does get to keep his English accent, which is nice) an ensemble cast that can't possibly match his intensity, as well as dialog that I can tell he simply hates saying. And it isn't helped by the fact that he's an inveterate mumbler (love ya, Tim, but I can usually get only about 65% of what you're saying) who is allowed to talk into his chest here quite a lot.
Anyway. I find it kind of insulting (oh, really, not kind of; in fact, very) when I (the audience) am provided with explanations of every single shot in a show: we are, apparently, much too stupid to glean that when a character looks down at another character's hands, shown in close-up on our screen, and said person is anxiously rubbing one hand up and down over the other, she's picking up the clue anvil that the hand-rubber IS LYING. No, the character has to then say, after her initial question and questioning glance, the close-up, the close-up shot of the look on her face that says, "gee, I know you're lying because you're exhibiting behaviors that in fact we've mentioned a couple times on the show as indicators of a lie in progress" to the hand-rubber, "You're lying." No, really? Thank you for explaining that. I would never have figured out after all that setup and close-upping that you knew she was lying. I am much too intellectually limited to have figured that out. And that's just a quick throwaway example. Most of this is accompanied by graphs and charts!
Throughout the show, we're treated to close-ups of actors in the process of attempting to enact the specific facial tics or eye cues or hand-rubbing or other body language (which I think must be very difficult for them), and then the lying experts (whose consultancy apparently feels no effects of the past few years of economic downturn and is in fact booming enough to own what looks like the swankiest office building since Eyes) compare them side by side to famous liars like Nixon, Clinton, and pretty much every politician ever, celebs, and the infamous such as the mom who killed her kids and blamed it on a carjacking, just in case WE DIDN'T GET IT. Because I know that in all the places I've worked, people have had to explain stuff I was already an expert about with visuals that reinforced what I already knew, just in case I was too dumb to get their explanation of what I already knew.
This is continually my peak issue with TV these days, and Lie to Me is quite possibly the zenith (I suppose it ought to be nadir, but I'm sticking with my simile) of that peak: exposition disguised as dialog. There is a way to do that in a manner that's not all info-dumpy or people explaining things to someone who already knows all that, but the most popular shows on TV are rife with the doing it badly version: the CSIs and their offspring initialism shows are the most egregious offenders. Most of the time, fans are very forgiving of this, since badly written shows like that tend to offer us the most fannish possibilities (I know *I* like to fix things) and a lot of the time, these things look really good and feature very attractive people. The Mentalist, for instance, is not an especially challenging show. Lie to Me, which is incredibly similar in its basic theme, though, offers none of what makes Mentalist work: Tim Roth, much as I love him, is no twinkly Simon Baker, and when they gave us a scene between Roth and the faintly cretinous supposed-wunderkind assistant who is new to the office, where she finds out he's lying (gasp!) about some dark secret in his past, it's impossible to feel anything like we felt at the end of Mentalist's first ep, when Jane walked into his empty house to sleep on the bare mattress under the happy face written in blood. All I could focus on was the fact that even a four-year-old would have been able to tell Roth was lying in that scene by the extreme facial twisting, narrowing of eyes, body twitching, and high-pitched voice.
When small children can do a better job of judging your (incredibly un-complex, simplistic) situations, you're doing TV wrong. When you have to explain every visual with an expositionary dump of dialog, you're writing it wrong. When characters talk to each other in ways real people don't talk, and explain everything to each other or answer the prompts given them because otherwise we wouldn't know what was happening ("He's like this throughout the tapes, until about six weeks ago." "Something must have changed!"), your dialog is wrong. It's stupid, wrong, and bad.
I'm fairly certain that low- and middlebrow America probably thinks these kinds of things are genius. But when you're looking for new and challenging TV that entertains while giving your brain a workout, it's more of the vast wasteland sameness I never saw TV as before. I'm in a demographic that is supposedly highly coveted by advertisers not for age but for intellect. We're the people the most creative and forward-thinking companies want to advertise to.
TNT's shows are not exactly genius either, but they did, with Leverage especially, get some ideas right before -- bring engaging actors to your series and let them interact in ways people actually interact (I'm especially thinking of Hardison here). Which is why Trust Me is such a freaking misfire -- it looked, from the commercials, like slash handed to us on a plate, but the two guys are such infuriatingly self-sabotaging jackasses who still manage to come out on top that it's impossible to jump on board with them. You want them to fail and get the smackdown. Even when the Leverage gang feels like warmed over Hustle or Burn Notice, you are sucked in by dialog that sounds like how people speak, and let's face it, amoral people mixing it up with Truth, Justice and the American Way is always fun; advertising is never interesting or fun, especially when the characters are all venal, two-faced, and not especially clever. TV show ad campaigns sound as lame as Aaron Sorkin's SNL sketch comedy show on Studio 60; in real life, you would sneer at most of the stuff they come up with that's "brilliant" on a show like Trust Me.
The second episode of Lie to Me starts off with a scene of a guy undergoing a polygraph on a newly developed by the military-industrial-complex lie detector, while Our Hero and his sidekicks observe from behind glass. Our Hero immediately declares it a joke and says that he can rig the results; he sends in a sexy woman to ask the questions, which flusters the testee and skews the results, then questions are asked that blow the test sky high. Nowhere does it indicate that they checked whether the guy was homosexual or hetero, of course, or that he might not be attracted to sluttish bombshells sticking their boobs in his face. Smugly, Our Hero points out how useless their tests are, how superior he and his lie detecting human beings are, and then the guy who put up the millions of taxpayer dollars for the new tech, and the developer, get into a huge fight, blah blah. Exit Our Hero and crew, with appropriate sneers of condescension and self-love.
Then the plot unfolds, a story about a female soldier falsely accusing her male sergeant of rape, and the obligatory B-plot that I don't even remember, but of course, each 12-minute segment features an also obligatory plot twist -- no, she's not falsely accusing him! No, wait, maybe it was a forbidden relationship! No, wait, someone went AWOL, maybe she's the real victim! No, wait, maybe we've run out of plot twists! And so it goes. Turns out this is the only way they can keep us guessing about what the lies are for -- neatly packed in-between-commercial-breaks twists. This gets really old really fast. (Not to mention that they telegraph the bad guy with the boldest of dots and dashes. I really expected to see mustache-curling. And it was David Anders from Alias!)
Together, both of these shows exemplified what I find myself hating more and more -- that we can't be trusted to read between the lines, to rub a couple of our brain cells together, to actually *watch* what's on the screen and understand it without someone drawing on the screen with arrows and circles, or using pop-up commentaries. Strangely, some of the most "lightweight" shows on TV right now, like Chuck, do a better job at letting us see stuff and understand it without having it explained to us than all these procedurals and specialty-detecting series. And clearly, some showrunners have a better handle on what it means to create characters that a thinking audience will engage with. Is Leverage or the Mentalist thinking TV? Not a chance. But they get all the other elements so right that you do get engaged, you do wait for the reveals even when you know exactly what will happen in each segment. Not only did I actively dislike everyone on Lie to Me and Trust Me, I disliked them because of the fact that they don't talk or act like real people, they spout cliches and expository dialog, and they don't have any engaging character tics that can pull me into their personalities and tell me who they are.
Scripted TV is slowly becoming indistinguishable from reality shows, which are themselves pretty scripted anyway. Everything's explained for the camera, everything has to appeal to the lowest common denominator, and etc. My big fear is that shows like Lie to Me will become the successful rule, that quirkiness or thinkiness will be phased out in increasing quantities. I've already seen that this year with how hard they've dumbed down Life by upping the ditzy whimsy factor to an almost painful point, totally missing the success that the mix of dark, vengeance-driven plot coupled with embracing-life zany hijinx and oddball humor brought to the show. My big fear is a whole slate of Lie to Mes and Trust Mes, and wow, trust me, I would much rather have a Dexter or a Wire or whatever lie to me and pretend I, along with millions of other American TV addicts, am intelligent and want more from a series.
Whew. Okay, that got longer and rantier than I expected. Next I should write about something I do like, Primeval (damn you,killabeez!).
My big problem is that a lot of the things I love have really disappointed me lately (Life, you're on notice!), some for a long time (BSG, I'm looking at you!), and I liked what
sherrold said when I was describing how BSG had jumped the shark for me a long time ago and I didn't know why I was watching it other than to see how it finally ends: "It's just there." I prefer to be excited by new episodes, myself, rather than watch because they are there.So with needing more new stimulus, I decided to try two new series that premiered this month: Lie to Me and Trust Me.
You know, most of the time, a bad show is just... a bad show. Sometimes I can even get behind the bad or cliched show if the dialog is witty enough or the characters are fun enough: this would pretty much encompass anything I watch on CBS, because none of those shows are intellectually challenging or emotionally engaging or creatively entertaining. In fact, just about everything on it, even my beloved Flashpoint, Mentalist, and Numb3rs, rely heavily on plots they've recycled from 1970s dramas they picked up on TVLand. I would defy anyone to randomly pick an episode of Adam-12 or Marcus Welby or MacMillan and Wife and not be able to match it up, complete with middlebrow-safe dialog, to an existing CBS show plotline. Which is okay, especially when you have characters like the emotionally damaged yet twinkly Patrick Jane, or the uberclam carries the weight of the world on his shoulders Don Eppes, or sexy but suffering supersniper Ed Lane. (I can't even count how many CBS procedurals still rely on this trope of how dangerous and scary and pervy the Internets are: hello, 1997, your scare tactics are calling.)
What isn't okay is when you throw all the cliches in a blender and put some high production values and elegant glittering modern sets and hire high-profile or journeyman TV actors to spew your recycled expository lowbrow-safe dialog and call it a hot new show, the way Lie to Me and Trust Me have done. Trust Me was just annoying; Lie to Me flat-out offended me because it wastes an incredibly talented actor, Tim Roth, by not only completely castrating him, but forcing him into a role that couldn't possibly be more wrong for his style and personality. And I tuned into it largely to see him, but he's saddled with (though he does get to keep his English accent, which is nice) an ensemble cast that can't possibly match his intensity, as well as dialog that I can tell he simply hates saying. And it isn't helped by the fact that he's an inveterate mumbler (love ya, Tim, but I can usually get only about 65% of what you're saying) who is allowed to talk into his chest here quite a lot.
Anyway. I find it kind of insulting (oh, really, not kind of; in fact, very) when I (the audience) am provided with explanations of every single shot in a show: we are, apparently, much too stupid to glean that when a character looks down at another character's hands, shown in close-up on our screen, and said person is anxiously rubbing one hand up and down over the other, she's picking up the clue anvil that the hand-rubber IS LYING. No, the character has to then say, after her initial question and questioning glance, the close-up, the close-up shot of the look on her face that says, "gee, I know you're lying because you're exhibiting behaviors that in fact we've mentioned a couple times on the show as indicators of a lie in progress" to the hand-rubber, "You're lying." No, really? Thank you for explaining that. I would never have figured out after all that setup and close-upping that you knew she was lying. I am much too intellectually limited to have figured that out. And that's just a quick throwaway example. Most of this is accompanied by graphs and charts!
Throughout the show, we're treated to close-ups of actors in the process of attempting to enact the specific facial tics or eye cues or hand-rubbing or other body language (which I think must be very difficult for them), and then the lying experts (whose consultancy apparently feels no effects of the past few years of economic downturn and is in fact booming enough to own what looks like the swankiest office building since Eyes) compare them side by side to famous liars like Nixon, Clinton, and pretty much every politician ever, celebs, and the infamous such as the mom who killed her kids and blamed it on a carjacking, just in case WE DIDN'T GET IT. Because I know that in all the places I've worked, people have had to explain stuff I was already an expert about with visuals that reinforced what I already knew, just in case I was too dumb to get their explanation of what I already knew.
This is continually my peak issue with TV these days, and Lie to Me is quite possibly the zenith (I suppose it ought to be nadir, but I'm sticking with my simile) of that peak: exposition disguised as dialog. There is a way to do that in a manner that's not all info-dumpy or people explaining things to someone who already knows all that, but the most popular shows on TV are rife with the doing it badly version: the CSIs and their offspring initialism shows are the most egregious offenders. Most of the time, fans are very forgiving of this, since badly written shows like that tend to offer us the most fannish possibilities (I know *I* like to fix things) and a lot of the time, these things look really good and feature very attractive people. The Mentalist, for instance, is not an especially challenging show. Lie to Me, which is incredibly similar in its basic theme, though, offers none of what makes Mentalist work: Tim Roth, much as I love him, is no twinkly Simon Baker, and when they gave us a scene between Roth and the faintly cretinous supposed-wunderkind assistant who is new to the office, where she finds out he's lying (gasp!) about some dark secret in his past, it's impossible to feel anything like we felt at the end of Mentalist's first ep, when Jane walked into his empty house to sleep on the bare mattress under the happy face written in blood. All I could focus on was the fact that even a four-year-old would have been able to tell Roth was lying in that scene by the extreme facial twisting, narrowing of eyes, body twitching, and high-pitched voice.
When small children can do a better job of judging your (incredibly un-complex, simplistic) situations, you're doing TV wrong. When you have to explain every visual with an expositionary dump of dialog, you're writing it wrong. When characters talk to each other in ways real people don't talk, and explain everything to each other or answer the prompts given them because otherwise we wouldn't know what was happening ("He's like this throughout the tapes, until about six weeks ago." "Something must have changed!"), your dialog is wrong. It's stupid, wrong, and bad.
I'm fairly certain that low- and middlebrow America probably thinks these kinds of things are genius. But when you're looking for new and challenging TV that entertains while giving your brain a workout, it's more of the vast wasteland sameness I never saw TV as before. I'm in a demographic that is supposedly highly coveted by advertisers not for age but for intellect. We're the people the most creative and forward-thinking companies want to advertise to.
TNT's shows are not exactly genius either, but they did, with Leverage especially, get some ideas right before -- bring engaging actors to your series and let them interact in ways people actually interact (I'm especially thinking of Hardison here). Which is why Trust Me is such a freaking misfire -- it looked, from the commercials, like slash handed to us on a plate, but the two guys are such infuriatingly self-sabotaging jackasses who still manage to come out on top that it's impossible to jump on board with them. You want them to fail and get the smackdown. Even when the Leverage gang feels like warmed over Hustle or Burn Notice, you are sucked in by dialog that sounds like how people speak, and let's face it, amoral people mixing it up with Truth, Justice and the American Way is always fun; advertising is never interesting or fun, especially when the characters are all venal, two-faced, and not especially clever. TV show ad campaigns sound as lame as Aaron Sorkin's SNL sketch comedy show on Studio 60; in real life, you would sneer at most of the stuff they come up with that's "brilliant" on a show like Trust Me.
The second episode of Lie to Me starts off with a scene of a guy undergoing a polygraph on a newly developed by the military-industrial-complex lie detector, while Our Hero and his sidekicks observe from behind glass. Our Hero immediately declares it a joke and says that he can rig the results; he sends in a sexy woman to ask the questions, which flusters the testee and skews the results, then questions are asked that blow the test sky high. Nowhere does it indicate that they checked whether the guy was homosexual or hetero, of course, or that he might not be attracted to sluttish bombshells sticking their boobs in his face. Smugly, Our Hero points out how useless their tests are, how superior he and his lie detecting human beings are, and then the guy who put up the millions of taxpayer dollars for the new tech, and the developer, get into a huge fight, blah blah. Exit Our Hero and crew, with appropriate sneers of condescension and self-love.
Then the plot unfolds, a story about a female soldier falsely accusing her male sergeant of rape, and the obligatory B-plot that I don't even remember, but of course, each 12-minute segment features an also obligatory plot twist -- no, she's not falsely accusing him! No, wait, maybe it was a forbidden relationship! No, wait, someone went AWOL, maybe she's the real victim! No, wait, maybe we've run out of plot twists! And so it goes. Turns out this is the only way they can keep us guessing about what the lies are for -- neatly packed in-between-commercial-breaks twists. This gets really old really fast. (Not to mention that they telegraph the bad guy with the boldest of dots and dashes. I really expected to see mustache-curling. And it was David Anders from Alias!)
Together, both of these shows exemplified what I find myself hating more and more -- that we can't be trusted to read between the lines, to rub a couple of our brain cells together, to actually *watch* what's on the screen and understand it without someone drawing on the screen with arrows and circles, or using pop-up commentaries. Strangely, some of the most "lightweight" shows on TV right now, like Chuck, do a better job at letting us see stuff and understand it without having it explained to us than all these procedurals and specialty-detecting series. And clearly, some showrunners have a better handle on what it means to create characters that a thinking audience will engage with. Is Leverage or the Mentalist thinking TV? Not a chance. But they get all the other elements so right that you do get engaged, you do wait for the reveals even when you know exactly what will happen in each segment. Not only did I actively dislike everyone on Lie to Me and Trust Me, I disliked them because of the fact that they don't talk or act like real people, they spout cliches and expository dialog, and they don't have any engaging character tics that can pull me into their personalities and tell me who they are.
Scripted TV is slowly becoming indistinguishable from reality shows, which are themselves pretty scripted anyway. Everything's explained for the camera, everything has to appeal to the lowest common denominator, and etc. My big fear is that shows like Lie to Me will become the successful rule, that quirkiness or thinkiness will be phased out in increasing quantities. I've already seen that this year with how hard they've dumbed down Life by upping the ditzy whimsy factor to an almost painful point, totally missing the success that the mix of dark, vengeance-driven plot coupled with embracing-life zany hijinx and oddball humor brought to the show. My big fear is a whole slate of Lie to Mes and Trust Mes, and wow, trust me, I would much rather have a Dexter or a Wire or whatever lie to me and pretend I, along with millions of other American TV addicts, am intelligent and want more from a series.
Whew. Okay, that got longer and rantier than I expected. Next I should write about something I do like, Primeval (damn you,
killabeez!).
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no subject
Date: 2009-02-14 11:46 pm (UTC)I wanted to like this show so much, I study this disiplin for fun, I pass the time watching the news and pointing how the liers to my family and so on, but this.... AARRGGHH!! And to make it worse, my best friend LOVES it! Every week, she asks, "Have you watched it yet? Have you? What did you think!?" and then dosn't wanna hear my pointing out the obvious mistakes. ::facepalm::
no subject
Date: 2009-02-15 12:26 am (UTC)\o/ !!
*waits patiently*
I am trolling the internet looking for decent Nick/Stephen fic even now. ENTERTAIN ME PLEASE.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-15 01:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-15 03:17 am (UTC)I really do believe though that scripted TV will get better with the rise of online TV and more independent creaters that don't have to rely on the mass ratings. It seems execs are just scared of decreasing ratings and try to go with safe, dumb writing than anything interesting or complex.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-15 04:23 am (UTC)It bothers me because it is another show where people who have no business doing so are actually interrogating people and trying to solve crimes.
Do you remember Murder, she wrote?. The main character would investigate, make suppositions, then make accusations. She usually had no actual evidence. If the accused simply said, "Uh...no, I didn't" instead of grabbing the gun and trying to shoot someone, she would never have had a conviction.
Lie to Me is the same thing. They can make good guesses, but they can't prove a thing unless someone breaks down and confesses. And I don't care if eleventy-million people wrinkle their noses and cross their eyes when they lie, I want to know how many people do it when they are not telling lies.
Plus, the main characters are all so smug that I can't stand them.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-16 01:51 am (UTC)Aside from Simon Baker, the main thing Mentalist has that Lie to Me completely lacked: Mentalist *entertains* me. Lie to Me wasn't entertaining. It was excruciating.
Poor Tim Roth. I hope Lie to Me gets canceled and he can find something better to do.
And *yes* about that freakin' office!