Bad TV and the New Math
Recently, when I told a friend of mine in Denver that I didn't have a Tivo or any such device, he made the statement, "Why not? There's always something you want to watch on TV." This shocked me because there's almost never something I want to watch on TV. I've been weaning myself from sports because I don't care for the personalities of most of the athletes. I deleted the news channels, the Weather Channel and MTV from the rotation in the remote control.
Other than spontaneously coming across History Channel documentaries or National Geographic Channel shows, I tend to flick past all the remaining channels in turn, click, click, click, while I'm eating dinner or resting my eyes after putting down a book. Drives my wife crazy.
The problem is that I want to like television. Truly good shows like The Sopranos or Seinfeld come along and make me wince all the harder at the rest of the cowardly, imitative knock-offs that pollute the cablewaves. Five hundred channels of cable TV mean 499 channels of junk at any given moment.
So I can't help but ask myself why I find so much of it garbage and I found two similar shows, both science fiction, both very popular, that offend me equally but for nearly opposite reasons. One produces junk by addition, the other junk by subtraction.
Impeccable production values and glitz don't make up for the many deficiencies in Star Trek: The Next Generation, especially when, to my mind, it's compared with the original show from the sixties. The annoying episodes featuring Worf's little boy growing up with difficulty, Data's quest for a sense of humor, constant insubordination from the crew - set all that aside, the show crosses from annoyance to offensive when the formula they use is a deus ex machina cloaked by a technology made up on the spot.
In other words, they'd have an episode where some minor but constant danger threatens the ship or the crew. Meanwhile, Alexander is fighting in school or Data is laughing inappropriately because he doesn't have a humor chip implanted in his android circuitry. At the very end of the episode, Alexander has adjusted, Data has performed as a night club comic, and the danger has increased to a potentially fatal level. And voila, the chief engineer says that he can re-route the tachyon emitters through the sensor array and boost the signal with the exhaust from the warp core. Won't you have to compensate for the Heisenberg differentiators? Well, yes, but that shouldn't be too hard. I can run a level three diagnostic to pinpoint the variations and adjust the power flow accordingly. Make it so. The day is saved by mumbo jumbo.
In the new Battlestar Galactica series, they attempt the same pulling of wool but instead of making stuff up, or adding nonsense to mask a poorly thought out plot, they leave things out and I guess hope viewers simply don't notice. The annoying things with this show have to do with the necessity of having Cylons fly their fighter ships (why would a machine need a separate machine to fly itself?), the apparent instinct for each robots own self-preservation (can't they just be fixed if shot?).
The offensive things are the plot points that involve things like the sabotage of the water tanks aboard the Galactica. Explosives are place on the outside of the tanks, venting the fleet's drinking water into space. The entire fleet had to stop in space and find water immediately. This story arc spanned several episodes where convicts were recruited into the high risk endeavor of recovering water from beneath the surface of a nearby moon.
Um, I asked myself, if you dump the water into space next to the ship, isn't the water sitting in space next to the ship? Wouldn't it be much less hazardous to scoop it up from there rather than from a toxic moon? If my Latin were better I'd try to come up with the antithesis of "deus ex machina," but it's not. Real sabotage would have been poisoning the water but then the fleet wouldn't need to halt, prisoners need to be freed, and all the other action that filled up two or three episodes.
In the first show, quality is sacrificed because in the one instance, hokey technology is ADDED at the last minute in order to save the day. In the second, common sense is SUBTRACTED at critical moments in order to further or create a conflct necessary to the drama. In both instances, this math detracts from the show and undermines the potential these shows otherwise may have had. Style over substance.
Where I really get offended is the sense I have that I'm supposed to watch these shows and simply not notice the clumsiness of the stories. Most of us are smarter than that. For proof, I offer the fact that we, the public, made successes out of intelligent, well written and produced shows like The Sopranos and Seinfeld. See, I knew we could do it...
Other than spontaneously coming across History Channel documentaries or National Geographic Channel shows, I tend to flick past all the remaining channels in turn, click, click, click, while I'm eating dinner or resting my eyes after putting down a book. Drives my wife crazy.
The problem is that I want to like television. Truly good shows like The Sopranos or Seinfeld come along and make me wince all the harder at the rest of the cowardly, imitative knock-offs that pollute the cablewaves. Five hundred channels of cable TV mean 499 channels of junk at any given moment.
So I can't help but ask myself why I find so much of it garbage and I found two similar shows, both science fiction, both very popular, that offend me equally but for nearly opposite reasons. One produces junk by addition, the other junk by subtraction.
Impeccable production values and glitz don't make up for the many deficiencies in Star Trek: The Next Generation, especially when, to my mind, it's compared with the original show from the sixties. The annoying episodes featuring Worf's little boy growing up with difficulty, Data's quest for a sense of humor, constant insubordination from the crew - set all that aside, the show crosses from annoyance to offensive when the formula they use is a deus ex machina cloaked by a technology made up on the spot.
In other words, they'd have an episode where some minor but constant danger threatens the ship or the crew. Meanwhile, Alexander is fighting in school or Data is laughing inappropriately because he doesn't have a humor chip implanted in his android circuitry. At the very end of the episode, Alexander has adjusted, Data has performed as a night club comic, and the danger has increased to a potentially fatal level. And voila, the chief engineer says that he can re-route the tachyon emitters through the sensor array and boost the signal with the exhaust from the warp core. Won't you have to compensate for the Heisenberg differentiators? Well, yes, but that shouldn't be too hard. I can run a level three diagnostic to pinpoint the variations and adjust the power flow accordingly. Make it so. The day is saved by mumbo jumbo.
In the new Battlestar Galactica series, they attempt the same pulling of wool but instead of making stuff up, or adding nonsense to mask a poorly thought out plot, they leave things out and I guess hope viewers simply don't notice. The annoying things with this show have to do with the necessity of having Cylons fly their fighter ships (why would a machine need a separate machine to fly itself?), the apparent instinct for each robots own self-preservation (can't they just be fixed if shot?).
The offensive things are the plot points that involve things like the sabotage of the water tanks aboard the Galactica. Explosives are place on the outside of the tanks, venting the fleet's drinking water into space. The entire fleet had to stop in space and find water immediately. This story arc spanned several episodes where convicts were recruited into the high risk endeavor of recovering water from beneath the surface of a nearby moon.
Um, I asked myself, if you dump the water into space next to the ship, isn't the water sitting in space next to the ship? Wouldn't it be much less hazardous to scoop it up from there rather than from a toxic moon? If my Latin were better I'd try to come up with the antithesis of "deus ex machina," but it's not. Real sabotage would have been poisoning the water but then the fleet wouldn't need to halt, prisoners need to be freed, and all the other action that filled up two or three episodes.
In the first show, quality is sacrificed because in the one instance, hokey technology is ADDED at the last minute in order to save the day. In the second, common sense is SUBTRACTED at critical moments in order to further or create a conflct necessary to the drama. In both instances, this math detracts from the show and undermines the potential these shows otherwise may have had. Style over substance.
Where I really get offended is the sense I have that I'm supposed to watch these shows and simply not notice the clumsiness of the stories. Most of us are smarter than that. For proof, I offer the fact that we, the public, made successes out of intelligent, well written and produced shows like The Sopranos and Seinfeld. See, I knew we could do it...
posted by Rick Ollerman at 8:51 AM
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