Re: Gaywood S2E1 Rear of the Year

On 18 Jan, 10:11, "solar penguin" <solar.peng...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
pbow...@xxxxxxx wrote:

I think you miss the point of this sort of drama. Although it has a
story arc, it's not about doing a book adaptation, getting from the
front cover to the last page for the sake of seeing how the story
progresses.

Don't patronise me.  I'm not an idiot.  I understand the point perfectly
well.  I just don't agree with it, because I think it's wrong.

Fair enough, but that wasn't your argument. In arguing that dramas are
bad by default because of weak plotting you're making a case which
simply isn't relevant to dramas whose plot is not the primary focus.
Take as an example any Doctor Who episode written by Simon Moffatt -
the plotting invariably has holes you can fly a TARDIS through. The
widely-acclaimed Blink was based entirely on a premise that was
invalidated by a single scene. If your criticism of drama lies here,
you'd have to concede these episodes were dreadful tripe. But as my
review of Blink pointed out, that's not the case here because
Moffatt's storytelling isn't reliant on coherent plots - he's more
interested in exploring themes with his stories than in giving a
traditional plot progression that makes any kind of sense.

There's no implication of idiocy in suggesting that one misses the
point - if what you're arguing is at an unrelated tangent to the case
you're replying to, it's a perfectly apt description. Expressing
indignation at supposed insults to try and assert some moral
superiority is a lazy tactic and has no bearing on the argument.

Drama can't work that way these days for these sorts of
series because all the plots are too hackneyed and predictable to
sustain a planned multiyear run.

Another of Aggy's bad habits: When the facts don't fit, just make up any
old crap and claim that it's true.

Another of Aggy's bad habits: Dismiss a relevant comment instead of
responding to it. Gosh, he does have a lot of bad habits, doesn't he?

There are still some dramas that manage to work that way these days.
Look at the BBC's adaptation of Cranford last year, one of the few
really good drama series of recent times.  

Look at what I said above: "all the plots are too hackneyed and
predictable to sustain a planned multiyear run". None of the examples
you gave are intended to support an ongoing series. Granted, you may
feel that the model of a series that's commissioned for 20-odd
episodes every year for 4-7 years is a bad one, but firstly that's not
the case you've made, and secondly it doesn't explain your liking
Stargate.

In any case, Cranford seems a poor example to support your case - it's
a prexisting story that people know, it's not trying to be
unpredictable or novel. You know going in what happens; as with
Hamlet, that's not why you watch. It doesn't need to present a new
story idea because it can rely on bringing in fans of the existing
story.

Excellent acting portraying
interesting characters.

Which is precisely the sort of thing I'm pointing out good drama does
provide, with or without coherent plotting. Heroes contains some very
good acting, and while you may not like the characters I find a number
interesting. I haven't been able to say the same of those costume
dramas I've seen or their original inspiration - Jane Austen, the
great author of late 17th Century soap opera, filled her pages with
unremittingly dull characters and identikit plots which no amount of
pretty costumes can overcome.

 And clear, unclutterred storytelling with three
whole books from the front cover to the last page in just four or five
episodes.  No need to pad it out into a multiyear run.

I still don't think you understand what I'm saying - it's not about
whether the story covers a front-to-back plot progression, it's about
whether that plot progression is the *point* of the story. Arguably,
it isn't in most books either. Do you read Lord of the Rings to find
out if Frodo will succeed, or in the foreknowledge that he will
succeed and wanting to know what happens to the character, how he
develops and how he gets out of different situations along the way?

Even last year's awful Oliver Twist still managed to tell the whole
story in a reasonable number of episodes.  Of course, that suffered from
being too modern in other ways: the music, the casting, the plot
changes.  (Sometimes the changes were literally "too modern" as in when
Bill Sykes killed himself in sewers that Bazalgette wouldn't build until
over thirty years after the story was set!)

See what I mean about historical inaccuracy?

Now, no doubt you're going to claim that these are all historical
costume dramas, and things are somehow different in sci-fi and fantasy
series.

No, what I'm going to claim is that most of the above is either not
relevant in the context I'm talking about (which has nothing to do
with genre) or reinforces my point, which tells me that you're still
confused about what I'm getting at.

 Well, what about last year's Jekyll?  A whole, self-contained
story, told from beginning to end in just six episodes.  Another good
example of clear, uncluttered storytelling.

Missed that; I was in Australia at the time and it hadn't got there by
the time I left.

So, clearly it _is_ still possible to do drama like that these days.

Well, I don't think anything's happened that makes it physically
impossible to do the same things they were doing years or decades ago,
but if the "good old days" were so much better, how about a rundown of
all the series that fulfilled your criteria for a 'good drama', not
just the cream of the crop sort you've presented here? Or is it just
that you've forgotten all the dross of those years and only remember
the gems, while today you're exposed to everything? Take sitcoms as an
analogy - the best British sitcoms to my mind date from the '60s to
the late '80s, and the modern batch seems mostly rubbish. But back in
those days they were mostly rubbish as well. Every Reggie Perrin had
several It Ain't Half Hot Mum's, every Steptoe several Liver Birds or
Good Life, every Porridge an Open All Hours, every Blackadder lots of
Are You Being Served? And I only use those names because they're the
dire sitcoms that have undeservedly made it into the repeats schedules
- there are plenty more that have been forgotten altogether. Yet
looking back you might swear that those decades were a golden age full
of Steptoe, Dad's Army, Reggie Perrin, Fawlty Towers, Porridge and
other sitcoms of that calibre. It ain't so.

 It
just doesn't happen often enough because the TV executives just don't
want to do it often enough.

So, can you give an example of when it did happen often enough?

It's part of the deal going into
something like this that you don't watch to find out "what happens
next" - you know full well what happens next (you do in every episode
of Star Trek ever made as well, but it's easier to get away with when
you only have 45 minutes to tell the story). It's what the characters
do and what they experience on the way there that gives these shows
their identity - in the words of Aerosmith, "life's a journey, not a
destination", and this is true of this sort of drama as well (and
indeed good drama throughout history - you don't watch Hamlet to see
what will happen at the end).

That's one of Aggy's more recent habits: spout obvious nonsense about
Shakespeare.

So, it's obvious nonsense that if you go in to watch Hamlet, you know
what will happen at the end?

If I watch Hamlet, I know that the end is going to come after about
two-and-a-half hours.  (Three hours if you include the interval.)  I'm
not stuck in the theatre for "a multiyear run" wondering when it'll
finish so I can go home.  And, more importantly, Shakespeare himself
knew how and when the story would end when he was writing it.  He took
the legend of Amleth and adapted if "from front cover to last page".  He
also added nice characterisations, sure, but he made sure gave them a
good plot too.

Bah, it took *two and a half hours* for Hamlet to kill his uncle, and
what happened the rest of the time? Soliliquies everywhere - all that
needless padding!

You see, this is the point I'm making. Lots of things happen in
Hamlet, mostly involving the development of the characters and a
gradual buildup to the denouement. It's not 'padding' just because it
takes a while to get to the end. Yet your criticism of Heroes was that
it was padded precisely because they hadn't resolved any of the
plotlines by the end of the year (and without watching the intervening
episodes). An analogy would be watching the first Act of Hamlet,
leaving and then coming back a couple of hours later and saying "What?
Claudius still isn't dead? What a waste of time!"

I don't actually think we're arguing on terribly different wavelengths
- you just don't seem to appreciate quite what it is I'm arguing.
You're dismissing a drama as being full of 'padding' for no other
reason than that the overall plot resolution takes a while. My point
is simply that resolving the plot as quickly as possible isn't the
point of the show. Of course you don't need a multiyear run to do
Hamlet - that's not what the medium was designed for. But by the same
token, Heroes wasn't designed to run in two and a half hours. You
can't tell from the length of the show how 'padded' it is - both
Hamlet and Heroes have plots that could have run to completion in a
fraction of the time. Greater length allows more aspects of the story,
world and character to be explored than a shorter time period. Of
course that doesn't necessarily imply that they will be - there are
plenty of shows out there guilty of padding, and Heroes hasn't been
immune through its run, but that alone doesn't render the thing
unwatchable or require people to be blind to its faults to watch it.

Now, if your claim had been about his cycle of history plays, then you
might have had a point.  Viewed as a single story, there's no clear plot
or storyline between them.  The cycle just meanders on and on and on,
going nowhere, especially when it gets bogged down around all the Henry
VIs.

But despite that, it is still watchable because of the wonderful
characters and dialogue.

Which is precisely the point I've made about shows like Heroes.

That's because Shakespeare was one of the few writers who are good
enough to get away with that.

No, I don't agree. I don't think it's about "getting away" with
anything. Most of Shakespeare's plays follow a formula in which the
plot is stretched out to allow a focus on character development. A
drama could tell the MacBeth story in the 45 minutes allowed for the
average TV episode (The Simpsons did Hamlet in ten minutes, come to
that...), but MacBeth isn't about charting the character becoming king
and following his progress until he gets killed, any more than The
Tempest is about Prospero getting deposed and then returning home.
It's about exploring the motivations for his decisions and the
consequences that ultimately get him killed. Shakespeare doesn't "get
away" with padding the plot because the characterisation's compelling
- the plot was just a vehicle for the characterisation which was the
focus of the story.

Of course TV writers aren't on a par with Shakespeare in terms of the
quality of their writing or, usually, their characterisations, but
they still tell stories from the same perspective Shakespeare did, and
it makes as little sense to criticise those shows for 'padding' the
plot as it does to criticise Hamlet for the same 'failing'.

It's pretty much  incidental that the story basically doesn't go
anywhere, but the fact that the story barely progresses doesn't mean
it's 'padding'. The past episode allowed Hiro's character to develop
by making space for a romance he wouldn't have been able to carry on
plausibly in the timeframe of the main series, and the importance of
that was in teaching him the limitations of his powers and giving him
an incentive to go after the 'brain man' other than Destiny. The
future episode allowed them to tell a short story outside the confines
of the main plot arc, by letting characters' actions have
repurcussions within that substory that wouldn't work in the main plot
(think of the way "Last of the Timelords" let Davies go overboard with
the Master story because by the conclusion, 'it hadn't happened' -
much better done in Heroes, but the principle's the same).

I don't think you're going to win me over by appealing to "Last of the
Timelords".

Fair point...

 I hated that story; not just the way it was done, but the
whole concept.

I hated the way it was done as yet another deus ex machina, but the
Heroes episode used a mechanism which allowed the story to be done as
an alternative future story from the start, not one we were intended
to believe was a 'real universe' story that conveniently never
happened come the end of the show. LotTL is a poor analogy, but was
the only one that came to mind that we were both likely to have seen -
on reflection, "Father's Day" might be a better analogy.

Phil
.

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