While
I'd love for someone to read this blog and imagine I was constantly
attending art gallery openings or standing at the front for
thrilling, cutting-edge gigs, the truth is I pretty much stay home
and watch the telly. Its getting so, if I spend too long in the
kitchen, the sofa starts asking sarcastically if I know what the time
is. So let's set the record straight with some recent small-screen
highlights, presented here in random order...
HOMELAND
A
fourth series of 'Homeland', taking place after
Brody's fairly unamendable departure, did initially seem a
shark-jumping moment. I was very much in two minds over whether to
watch it at all. As things turned out, its been widely received as
the best series since the first. Almost entirely relocating events to
Islamabad and Kabul, it could even feel like a whole new series,
which merely happened to have Carrie and some carry-over characters
from 'Homeland' show up in it.
'Homeland'
has often felt a bizarre, contorted and jarring beast, its main
attraction simultaneously its main drawback. They were capable of
delivering humdinger plot twists, curves you couldn't see coming but
once they'd arrived made total sense, which made it all the more
infuriating when they started making stuff up as they went along.
Thankfully this most recent series been able to supply surprises
while (mostly) staying the right side of credulity.
However,
it continues to exemplify a general trend so perfectly its almost
deserving of praise for doing it. It's now become commonplace to
describe a drama as a stupid person's idea of what smart is. Whereas
'Homeland' often feels like a moral simpleton's
idea of what morally complex is. It's well known that American
conservative guru Leo Strauss was a fan of the TV Western
'Gunsmoke', feeling its simplistic certainties
gave audiences the illusions necessary for society to function.
Whereas today we want to be flattered at the same time as we're
patronised. The message of 'Homeland' more or less
reduces to “life gets complicated. You must know that, watching a
smart show like this. But don't worry too much because ultimately
we're always right.”
A
classic moment is the scene where Haqqani holds Fara hostage. Given
what he wants, he stabs her anyway. There's no rhyme or reason for
him to do this, other than to make him so 'black' that however 'grey'
the good guys get they won't be closing in on him.
And
even though the ending was clearly intended to be not just feel-bad
but compromising, in that watching it you realise you can't conceive
of a better outcome, all the above still applies. Adal's
machiavellian last-minute deal with Haqqani fits too easily with
everything else to be truly jarring. The theme of the series is that
some dirty jobs just need doing, so they're essentially unquittable
even as they screw up those stuck with carrying them out. The shit
sticks and then stays stuck. Adal's deal just shifts this from the
operational to the strategic level. The point about dealing with
devils is that eventually you have to make a deal with one.
And
Adal's deal must be seen in the context of Lockhart's parallel but
opposite journey, where events knock the once-adversary down to
everyone else's level. (To the point where he can sit drinking whisky
at a table with Carrie and Quinn.) The angels may get compromised by
association with the devils. But angels they stay.
BABYLON
A
police-based version of the political satire 'The Thick of
It' with added dramatic moments... not something that
initially strikes you as a bright idea. Yet overall it worked
surprisingly well. If the dialogue spats didn't quite throw up
'Thick Of It' sparks they could be memorable
enough, without detracting from the more dramatic parts.
Certainly,
the series was well timed. In recent years the police have frequently
been propelled into the headlines through frictions between
themselves and the political class, assailed as they are with
cutbacks on the one side and privatisation on the other. Issues such
as Plebgate played out against this disharmonious background.
Now
you might not expect a popular TV show to ask penetrating questions
about the police, and their precise role in class society. And indeed
it doesn't. Why are they being cut now? Because the political class
calculate their enemies have now been knocked back enough that they
can start to scrimp on attack dogs. This puts the police in the same
defensive position as other groups of workers, the ones who they once
earned their overtime by attacking. The irony of this isn't something
thats gone into. The series culminates in what's effectively a
police strike. In other words a police strike is essentially dreamed
up for dramatic purposes, while an actual series of strikes in the
Fire Service rarely hit the headlines. At the same time, however, its
interesting that a popular drama simply takes it as axiomatic that
police privatisation is a bad idea.
The
depiction of the riot seems similarly indicative of the contemporary
groupthink. Its a protest about the police shooting of a black youth,
which we see happening and know to have occurred under dodgy
circumstances (as the real riots were a response to the killing of Mark Duggan). But its
simultaneously an opportunistic response to the effective police
strike. The ragbag array of causes attached to the riot becomes an
opportunity for humour (with the sardonic comment “they haven't
elected a head rioter yet” to be negotiated with), a literalisation
of the widely used term 'rentamob'.
Perhaps
we're better of looking at what it does. While it
isn't much like 'The Wire' it performs a similar
structural device of presenting the institution as seen through
several levels. (Effectively high command, the Armed Response Unit
and the Territorial Support Group. Even if the last group seem to
become regular cops whenever the plot requires.) And it keeps these
levels quite rigidly separate. While individuals might cross them
from time to time, this is clearly going to be something momentary.
We get more of a sense of what such an institution is, through this
effective triangulation of crossfire.
Yet
despite this structure and the ensuing ensemble cast, as the sole
outsider fledgeling Director of Communications Liz Garvey (played by
Brit Marling) becomes the protagonist by default. Which would make
her the equivalent of Thick of It's' Malcolm
Tucker. Which raises an important distinction. Tucker's clearly
presented as the star of the show, and indeed its hard not to nurse a
secret admiration for the Machiavellian bastard. Garvey's role is
more ambiguous. The pilot episode (broadcast back in February) seemed
built around her resolute adherence to her “flag” of openness
despite all the heavy buffeting it receives. (All on her first day,
even.) At times she's presented as the police's conscience, refusing
to countenance slandering the name of a black lad shot by the ARU.
And she's given an adversary, in the shape of the cynical,
gum-chewing Finn (played by Bertie Carvel) who sees his job in terms
of the more traditional burial of bad news. And, if he can manage it,
hit'n'runs on rivals who've strayed onto his career path.
Yet
at other points it becomes obvious her crusading zeal is really to
nothing more than policing as PR, an inability to distinguish between
openness and photo-ops. Rather than releasing edited footage she'd
rather edit the reality before the footage is taken, and at points
this fixation with Twitter streams has operationally disastrous
consequences. It's at its clearest in her speech about taking down
the Death Star of current practise to replace it with a “perspex
Death Star, a better Death Star”. Yet not only does she seem
oblivious to any of this, the series never quite gears itself up into
taking her on about any of it. She's less the anti-hero of Tucker and
more the hero by default seenin contemporary films such as 'The Social Network'. The
underlying message seems – she may not be right,
but at least she's contemporary. Which is sort of
the same thing, isn't it?
GOTHAM
Like
'Babylon', 'Gotham' seems to have started from the
most peculiar of scenarios – let's have the Batman universe without
Batman in it. (Perhaps they're also planning 'Ma and Pa Kent
– The Early Years' and 'The Rough, Tough Boyhood
of Starro the Conqueror'.)
Having
got rid of Batman they immediately replace him - with the young
Gordon (played by Ben McKenzie), even down to the gravelly monotone
voice as a signifier for the relentlessness of justice. The idea
seems to be to up the stakes by giving us the supervillains (and the
crooks often seem on the cusp of supervillainry), with only the very
human Gordon to go against them.
To
do this it has to take on a rather ludicrous conceit, that Gotham's
in a kind of dark age interregnum between his parents being killed
and Bruce growing up into Batman. (The credit sequence contains the
quote “there's a war coming, a terrible war. There will be rivers
of blood in the streets.”) Because of course the only thing that
can make the world better is the well-meaning super-rich. It not only
rests on the most reactionary assumption of the comics (that Batman's
a kind of super-philanthropist, that if he wasn't wealthy enough to
have all those Bat-gizmos crime would overrun us) with the worst
'innovation' of the films. (That the Waynes can't be killed by a
common criminal leading Bruce to declare war on crime, there has to
be something special about that criminal making
the whole thing into one journey of personal redemption and all the
rest of it.)
Which
means it keeps the movies' fixation with origins, as if that's what
the superhero is all about. Imagine making a film about the Apollo
mission and keeping cutting back to the astronaut's training, like
all the stuff about landing on the moon is just after the fact.
There's less emphasis on Batman's own origin, which is (at least so
far) kept incipient. They're more Gotham's and his future
adversaries. The results sometimes feel like a set of Just So
stories, how the Penguin got his waddling walk and so on.
But
much like 'Babylon' it takes this unpromising
premise and works it. Batman is after all merely the straight man of
his world, there so the more colourful criminals have someone to play
off against. Perhaps more than any other superhero, Batman is
his rogue's gallery. And replacing one straight man with another,
even as cliched a character as Gordon, doesn't really lose us much.
So
if all hangs on the rogue's gallery, the good news is that this is
great! The star of the show isn't the tedious Gordon, but Robin Lord
Taylor's deliciously creepy Penguin, duplicitously fawning and
backstabbing his way through and up the criminal underworld. The
Penguin is a character often seen as inhabiting the cartoony world of
the Sixties TV show, now banished by the shadow of the
all-growed-up-now Dark Knight. But here he's already managed to
create two cliff-hangers merely by showing up. And as befits the
title Gotham itself becomes a character in the show, an (as the name
might suggest) gothic temple to sin like something out of Brecht and
Weill.
The
main weakness is the insistence on each episode having its own
storyline. While everyone's attention is on the ongoing criminal war,
these feel not only inferior and derivative but often half-hearted.
They don't seem likely to draw in the casual viewers they're
presumably intended for. 'Gotham' is a long-haul
novel-structure show, not especially adept at disguising itself as
weekly TV.
MARVEL'S
AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D.
In
its first series, this often felt like an inferior warm-up for the
Marvel Universe films. It's essentially a cop buddy show with science
fictional bolt-ons. Which is, you know, fine. Except that scenario
places a sitcom-like emphasis on the rapport between the lead actors,
and I wasn't at all sure there was one. Coulson (played by Clark
Gregg) worked in the 'Iron Man' and
'Avengers' films precisely because everybody
expected the suit to be a straight man rather than a character (hence
Stark's incredulous line “I thought his first name was Agent”),
so even a little went a long way. Taking him out of that context felt
as if you were to take Niles out of 'Frasier'.
Lose the context and you lose the environment, and with it the
character's purpose.
Chloe
Bennett (playing Sky) looked a classic case of having been hired for
her pretty face rather than any acting ability, while Fitz and
Simmons were an American's rather annoying idea of what twee British
people are like. Take away all the heroes, take away Nick Fury, and
what were you left with was a daft acronym and a supporting cast
hanging around without a lead?
But
the new characters work better. It seems unlikely anybody would fail
to guess where Lance Hunter (Nick Blood) and Bobbi Morse's (Adrianne
Palicki) will-they-won't-they act would end up, but it was more about
the journey than the destination. Also, the plotlines have by now
gained their own traction, rather than relying on hand-me-downs from
the films. It's like a Shield universe, rather than the mere
reflection of a Marvel universe, has had time to coalesce. The way
the alien markings led to the underground city did feel like a
gradually unfolding mystery, rather than one stock secret getting
lined up behind another.
There
remains, alas, Marvel's proprietary habit of sticking the name Marvel
in front every other Marvel word which pretty quickly gets Marvelling
annoying, and mostly reminds me of that 'Simpsons'
episode where Bart went around writing “property of Bart Simpson”
everywhere. (The word 'Marvel' should probably be in that sentence a
couple more Marvel times.)
In
other news... Here in the Old World, we still know how to do a ghost
story. 'Hinterland' was essentially a detective
story presented as a ghost story, while 'Remember Me'
was unashamedly the full phantoms-in-the-attic caboodle. They both
work through evoking such a strong sense of locale, in North Wales
and Yorkshire respectively. This lends proceedings a double virtue,
locating the tale in our world while providing a liminal space, where
the incursion of the supernatural seems only a matter of time. Like a
lightning rod for the spectral.
Mostly,
though, I just watch documentaries on BBC4. I suppose I could write
about those. It would mostly consist of me saying things like “it
was all about an ancient Andean civilsation I'd not heard of before.
I learnt lots of new and interesting things. Forgotten them all now,
though. But maybe they'll repeat it.”
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