Television that hurts
Two of the season’s new standout SF/fantasy shows, Jericho and Heroes, are both abysmally awful in their own ways. Because I’ve been chronicling their rapid downward spirals over at the MeeVee blog, I’ve had to pay preternaturally close attention to them, which has no doubt magnified my dismay.
When I first read about Jericho, it was as a critical standout — it was to be a dark and edgy show about life in a small Kansas town called Jericho after nukes obliterate most of the US. I was expecting something raw and nihilistic like Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale. Instead, the show is eerily reminiscent both politically and narratively of 1980s Cold War classic Red Dawn, in which hero Patrick Swayze fights off a Russkie invasion with the help of a small-town high school football team.
The main characters in Jericho are all good, clean Americans. You know, white men. Robert, the only black character (and the only person of color on the show) is some kind of secret agent whose behavior gets more and more suspicious. The women are mostly useless (except for one who can fix engines), and have “helper” jobs as schoolteachers, shopkeepers, or homemakers. Nuclear annihiliation is really only a backdrop to the real drama of the show: the relationships between fathers and sons, as well as the importance of protecting the family unit. Of course, there’s a lot of exotic talk about atomic bombs — the show’s writers seem to think that we need a five-minute lecture about why radioactive fallout is dangerous — which seems largely aimed at reviving that venerable old US tradition of atomic horror.
Jericho is one of the most conservative shows I’ve watched in a long time. Not only is it mining the retro Cold War vein, but it’s also working its ass off to set up a situation where old-fashioned family values are all that’s left in the world. The only plot arc that could save this series, as far as I’m concerned, is if it turns out that aliens or ghosts set off the nukes. Hey, maybe it was Xenu!
Like a lot of conservative TV and movies, Jericho has one thing going for it: coherence. You’re never left wondering what the hell is going on, or who a particular character might be. There are good guys and bad guys, white heroes and black spies, strong men and emotional women. No fucking around with ambiguity or the unexpected. The show Heroes, however, doesn’t benefit from a reliance on conservative cliches. It’s all over the place with its multiple characters (whom we have to meet in dreary succession, learning about each of their stereotypical lives) and star-crossed mutants plot.
For those who didn’t tune in last Monday for the pilot, whose over 14 million viewers earned NBC the coveted “timeslot ratings winner” ribbon, Heroes is about a batch of people who develop “special powers” overnight. One can kill with her mind; one can fly; one can teleport; and several more can do several other predictable things. I’ll admit that the cast is pleasingly diverse — there’s even a hot guy from India in the lead role, which has to be a first for nighttime drama — and you won’t find much in the family values department here. What you also won’t find are good writing or plot development.
I’m not a hater of stories featuring big casts. I’ve even been reading Grant Morrison’s 7 Soldiers of Victory in the proper order, meeting each new character individually and skipping between their stories confusingly just to get the right feeling out of the series. But Heroes is no Grant Morrison comic book. The show is so busy trying to get on its feet and introduce everybody that excitement and good dialog fall by the wayside. Instead of glib moodiness, or even smart drama, we get bad voice-overs about how “everybody has a destiny” and “we all want to be special.” Enough, already! Get to the superheroics!
Turns out the superheroics in Heroes won’t happen until we meet all the characters (tune in next week to meet three more on top of the seven we already know), they meet each other, and we figure out what the psychic painter’s picture of a nuke going off in New York means. Hmm, I sense a nuke theme here. If only we could wed the coherence of Jericho with the potentially interesting characters in Heroes. If only Grant Morrison wrote for TV. If only Firefly hadn’t been cancelled. If only Battlestar Galactica were having its season premiere in a week and I would get to see Lucy Lawless in a good role again. Ha! At least I’ll get one thing that I want.
You can read my reviews of the first two Jericho episodes here and here. My review of the Heroes premiere is here, and my gushing look forward to the new season of Battlestar Galactica is here.
