Okay, I confess.
Over the last what, year or so? Stargate has grown on me. At first I said, "What is this ridiculous stupidity?" And then I said, "Okay, the characters are interesting, if a bit clichéd and occasionally TSTL, but the whole neo-colonialism America knows best! thing, and the mythology, oh gods it hurts us." And then I said, "But there's a place for unchallenging melodrama: you can enjoy it for what it is."
And then I got to seasons nine and ten, and Ben Browder as Cam Mitchell and Claudia Black as Vala Mal Doran sold me on the package. No show that puts those two together in a scene can be bad.
I've been mulling over this since I finished season ten a couple months - three or four months? - ago. And yeah, I have to come out all in favour.
I still find this whole business of watching television kind of weirdly guilt-inducing. (Probably why I do it at every opportunity. Catholic upbringing = sucker for guilt.) I pretty much watched nothing between age twelve and age nineteen. I read, I wrote, I studied, I played sports. But tv? Why the hell would I want to watch that? There were better/more important/more interesting things to do.
But just before my Leaving Cert exams, I discovered this thing called Battlestar Galactica that everyone was raving about, and bought the DVD.
Hey, these were life-affecting examinations. I needed a distraction. An undemanding distraction.
And that was fine. DVDs watched, exams over, on with my life...
...Until, a little less than a year later, I got sick. I mean, nastily sick. Lie on the couch and not get up for a week sick, while my body ran a fever and insisted that I live on small amounts tinned pears, bread, and flat 7-Up (I still can't look at tinned pears without feeling slightly nauseaous and dizzy). I couldn't read, couldn't sit-up, so...
I went through pretty much all of Buffy in those couple of weeks, and some of Angel. And trust me, that show is truly weird when your processors aren't running at full capacity. Seriously
Since then - two years, more or less - my DVD collection has ballooned, nearly all of it serial television. And in that time I've discovered something interesting about myself.
Well, interesting to me, anyway.
Over the same period where I've noticed my taste in books become far more picky, my enjoyment of visual media has remained undiscriminating. Actually, I suspect it's grown less so.
As long as there are swordfights/gun battles/things blowing up, there's some amusing dialogue, the actors can (mostly) act, and the scenery's diverting, or at least three of the four, I'm inclined to give it a go. I'm not invested in television the same way I am in books: if a book is bad or stupid or insults my intelligence, I can get angry at it.
In television, I like poking fun at the bad/stupid whatever. It's a game: can I guess how bad or stupid or clichéd the plot is going to be? As long as I'm having fun with the melodrama or the performance or whatever, I'll stick it out.
This accounts for me having watched DVDs of such shows as Alias, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Xena the Warrior Princess, CSI: Miami and CSI: NY, and the BBC's Robin Hood. Trust me, no matter how stupid you think television can get, Robin Hood is worse: turns out that despite the pretty boys and the archery and the horses and the trees, I couldn't stick it out till the end.
On the other hand, I've seen Criminal Minds and Farscape and Firefly and a good deal of Sherlock Holmes - which is a piece of sheer excellence, with incredible actors - not to mention gems of their time such as Mission: Impossible and The New Avengers.
And the other shows, the ones that fall in between: Buffy and BSG and both incarnations of Stargate before Browder and Black.
And I'm working my way round to some half-formed thoughts on storytelling and audience and making assumptions about your audience.
Criminal Minds and Farscape are a pair of shows that, while different in almost every obvious particular, are alike in a couple of ways. They both assume the audience is smart enough to keep up with the writers, and they don't bother to explain every last little thing - oh, there's exposition, but it usually does a couple of things at once. More, they assume the audience not only can keep up, but is interested in keeping up, and thus take the risk of doing - for television standards - fairly complex things with characterisation. Real growth, no reset buttons.
Not to mention, shall we say, diverse phenotypes?
Criminal Minds might have that whole, we're-the-FBI-we're-here-to-help-you thing going. But it also points up that the FBI/the police can make the wrong call. And it is not interested in telling you comforting lies. People break. People die. Other people, people with broken bits and flaws of their own, have to come along and do the best they can to stop that happening, and sometimes - regularly - they fail.
Farscape is another television show about the ways people break under stress - maybe less obviously so than CM, and perhaps less viscerally so: but the devolution of John Crichton from the slightly goofy astronaut who says, You can't go around pointing guns at people! to the man who four years later straps himself to a nuclear bomb in order to give himself something to bargain with is... some serious character development. And Farscape's other thing is distrust of authority - nearly all the organisations and governments Crichton encounters are Out To Get Him, and they're certainly in no way the good guys.
Of course, from their point of view, they're not the bad guys
Okay, both these shows also have their flaws. No one's perfect, and hell, it's television. Factual accuracy is not always a priority, and the forty-/forty-five-minute episode format has its limitations.
But I look at them, and the assumptions they make about their audiences, and I do a brief comparison to either of the CSIs or to Stargate.
In the world of CSI, the police are God. They're almost never wrong, and when they are wrong, they fix it. All murderers are caught, all crimes are solved, all survivors heal, eventually.
In Stargate, there's a very pointed dichotomy between the good guys and the bad guys, between Us and Them, so to speak. Between the US and everyone else, I might go so far as to say. The good guys - SG-1, Stargate Command - are very shinily Good. They do the Right Thing no matter what the cost.
They operate on the assumption that the right, or the better, thing is knowable. That there are no choices between two equally unpleasant evils. And that the choices made by the (shiny! good!) people in authority will work out okay in the end.
The difference between the two sets is, essentially, in the amount of ambiguity each show affords to the viewer. And how much the show is prepared to challenge the views of (parts of) the audience. Criminal Minds is all about having no good choices. Farscape is all about having very few good choices, and realising that the Other Side's moral compass may be just as valid as yours is.
And I was thinking about ambiguity and audience and storytelling, and how and why some pieces of fictions get away successfully with more subversion of the standard trope - that of the audience know who the good guys are, and the good guys are recognisable and recognisably right - than others.
(I was talking this out in chat. I was looking for the argument in melodrama or its close cousins, the angle, the dialectic. Because it's not just, or not deliberately, or at least not always or only deliberately, an argument in favour of authority and the status quo, made by people who are satisfied with how the world works for people who are satisfied, or want to be, with how the world works.)
Because if fiction reflects reality, then fiction should really have a whole hell of a lot of ambiguity. Rather than having two shows that I'm able to identify which make it a big part of the theme, most of the rest being actively engaged in an argument against ambiguity.
So a lot of popular fiction - television especially - has not realism, but verism. The shows or books that succeed in (despite!) their subversions, as Bear pointed out to me in chat, do so because they hide them.
And hello, moment of comprehension. Fictions with ambiguity - fictions which subvert, and do so successfully enough to attract parts of an audience that is not already primed to challenge their status quo - kick dirt over the subversion. They distract the attention with a bit of flash somewhere else, a little light and magic, whatever.
The point is, they're engaged in telling a story - in communicating - on more than one level. And that would be why they're harder to find and require a bit more engagement than your average melodrama.
And that might be why I find an episode of Stargate easy and fun to watch, and CSI laughable but fun, and an episode of, say, Criminal Minds (and the odd one of Farscape, when I go back to watch some of the best ones) more likely to require energy. Some episodes of CM, even seen for the fifth time, stay as engaging (and sometimes as wrenching) as they were the first time round.
I personally find the fictions with the ambiguity more rewarding than the other kind, even if they do demand more engagement. But there seem as though there are a lot more of the other kind.
So, coming to the point. Which is a question. (If anyone's read this far, that is.) What do you think about ambiguity and audience and storytelling?
(Am I off my head? Has too much television finally rotted my brain, like my grandmother used to promise?)
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