What the hell is wrong with TV writers? Are there laws against compelling storylines with intriguing characters who don't seek out cliched situations or utter the dullest possible one-liners? Is it impossible to develop a story with direction, focus, and uncontrived complexity all without losing its ability to be serialized? AM I ALONE IN THE UNIVERSE?
Scenario: A civilization of ultra-advanced humans in some distant future abducts thousands of people from the 20th century timeline, enhances them all in different and subtle ways, then drops them off early in the 21st century to effect broad changes to humanity's fate. Awesome, right? So why did the creators of The 4400 have to muck it up by turning it into a procedural cop drama with all the obvious and silly dilemmas offered by that genre? At least that show had Jordan Collier, an ambiguous goodie/baddie who alternately had humanity's benefit/destruction on his mind; his part added a complexity that the rest of the show couldn't provide.
This is all to say that The 4400 was a slightly more impressive venture than the reboot of V - an alien invasion story set in (who knew?!) NYC that has also been overloaded with cliched dialogue and relationships on top of being molested by bland cop show paranoia. I've honestly only watched the first four episodes of the new V, but I'm pretty sure I won't see any more. I like fantastic stories, I love genre trappings like time travel and other worlds, but stories require writers, not Dahl's Great Automatic Grammatizer machine that digests unoriginal thoughts and flattens the pulp into uninteresting blather. I mostly think zombie stories are pretty foolproof as far as generating greatness, but Fulci's Zombi makes enough gross errors in judgement to dissolve any interest in its ideas.
I've been saddened by the idiocy of Prison Break's later seasons (first one was bang-up; fell apart after that), the slavish genre devotion of Taken, and the more colorless characters on Dexter (which is in other ways fantastic). Lost was plagued with anemic writing, even when the mythology was rich and the plotlines heady. West Wing was a gold-plated leviathan of writing, acting, and production for four seasons, but lost boldness and character when Sorkin and company passed the baton to lesser creatures. Firefly flashed serious promise, but was cancelled near the climax of its story, and the promise was never fulfilled in the disappointing movie that followed.
Rescue Me is rough and hilarious. So is The Office. And (even while it flounders at times) Chuck. I don't even consider myself a particular fan of comedy - by all means, give me a dark story and make me believe even its most outlandish notions - but are these the only kinds of shows that will excite me anymore?
Sorry. No music today. Maybe next week.
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