Kill the Networks, Not the TV

I don’t care what the goddamn intellectual elitists say. I will not shoot my fucking TV.
Television gets a bad rap on the culture scale, but I have a hard time trusting any society that places Andrew Lloyd Webber higher than Joss Whedon.
I’m not saying that all TV is good: there is a lot of crap out there.
But I have always believed that you can learn more from a culture by sifting through its garbage cans than admiring what it puts on its walls and calls art.
It’s in the garbage cans that we find the used dildos, old love letters, and copies of Olivia Newton John’s ‘Physical’.
Watching television is the best way to understand American culture.

What it is most interesting to me about television is that while film quality has by-and-large gotten worse over the past ten years, television has been forced to improve.
I attribute this, in large part, to HBO and the Sopranos which forced mainstream networks into coming up with better narratives and stronger, more serialized, story arcs.
A blockbuster film can be mediocre but still do relatively well in the box office because people bring dates and families and only have to sit through it once.
Television is different though–when you decide to watch a television show you are inviting the stories and the characters into your home once a week.
Americans have addictively intimate relationships with serialized television and in many ways film cannot compete with this intimacy.
I am not going to try and claim that all television is good (and, for the moment, we are going to ignore the problematic nature of reality TV)
but those who have been closely watching the changes in television over the past ten years cannot possibly deny that in many ways there has been a golden age of quality narratives on television.

But the problem is this: networks and producers don’t entirely understand their audiences.
They are still tied to the old ways of Neilson ratings and market shares. They don’t really understand that in actuality, where television is concerned, fandom (not necessarily numbers) rules.
Proof of this comes in form of the parades of quality shows that have had large and dedicated fan bases but were discarded far too quickly by impatient networks.
(Off the top of my head: Arrested Development, Freaks and Geeks, Studio 60, Firefly, Undeclared, Jake 2.0, Veronica Mars, Sports Night.)
On television, fandom rules and fandom cannot be understood purely by ratings but can be ascertained by online discussion, fan fiction, creation and sales of show related products, and also importantly, by piracy.
Ultimately it is the most pirated shows, the ones that travel unstoppably around the corridors of the internet–these are the shows that are truly successful.
Everybody Loves Raymond might have had good Neilson ratings, but Arrested Development will be watched and admired for at least the next 50 years.
And, it would appear--given an article that appeared in this week’s Television Week-
-that networks have finally begun to understand this dynamic.
According to the article seven new fall television shows have been leaked onto pirate sites, and many of these shows may or may not have been leaked by the networks themselves.
What is most compelling about this “illegal” interaction is that many networks put their new shows up for free and legal download on their official web sites.
I suspect that they know that the easiest way to get the geek fan-culture types to watch their new shows and create a buzz is by “illegally” leaking what they would gladly give out legally.

Below is my brief reviews of the seven leaked television shows.
There are only a few that I think have real potential and staying power, but I think there is something compelling about the fact that these were the shows that were leaked.
Television alone is no longer a barometer for American culture, but also what is pirated and what networks might assume to be pirate-able.

Bionic Woman

I wrote my master’s thesis on action television heroines, so I was particularly curious to see how NBC’s portrayal of Jaime Sommers would pan out.
In the exposition-laden first episode, I was neither disappointed nor particularly impressed. Interestingly the new Jaime Sommers seems to resemble newer action heroines such as Alias’ Sydney Bristow or Dark Angel’s Max (with her whining and tears)
more than she resembles the 1970s Sommers who was irrevocably perky and emotionally chaste. Like other modern action heroines, the new Sommers constantly treads the line between powerful and powerless.
Have you ever seen a masculine action show where the protagonist finds out that he has super-human cyborg powers and consequently cries his little eyes out in a bathtub? That’s what I thought.
I also highly suspect that this was a premature release done on purpose by studios–the legal notices at the beginning (and watermarked throughout the episode) were enough for most pirates to masturbate
over and the show stars geek icon Katee Sackhoff of BSG fame (which I guess means that Starbuck really is dead. Sigh.) This was built, produced, and exposed to the geek pirates who will clearly make it a hit. The question is whether or not the narrative will be good enough that mainstream audiences will follow along with them. The writing is not bad, the special effects were not overdone, and the acting was decent, but the story was not particularly compelling to start with.
In order for the new Bionic Woman to be better, faster, stronger than the other action babes, it is going to have to get some good narrative and fast.

Pushing Daisies

Originally meant to be a spin-off of Showtime’s Dead Like Me, ABC’s Pushing Daisies was unquestionably the most charming addition to the fall lineup (that I have seen thus far).
I also suspect it will be a breakaway hit. (In recent years, ABC has become fairly good at both picking weird and edgy shows and marketing them properly.)
Pushing Daisies is a fairy tale of sorts about Ned, a man who is able to touch dead people and bring them back to life (though not without repercussions and caveats).
Ned manages to be both repressed and quirkily lovable, and finds himself in quite a bind when he brings his long lost childhood sweetheart back to life and must ultimately deal with the fallout of this decision.
The show is not particularly profound, but it is awfully cute, shot in bright colors and with a lot of wide-angle lenses. Raold Dahl would have been a big fan of Pushing Daisies, I suspect.
I would forecast that this show will last at least a few seasons, and will have a sizable fan following.
I am unsure whether this show was leaked on purpose–but I think the creators know that they have something potentially compelling–even if not meant for the geek crowd.

The Sarah Connor Chronicles

The Sarah Conner Chronicles, a spin-off of the Terminator films, was meant to be a mid-season release in 2008.
The show is well-written, slickly directed, fast-paced, and full of special effects that are surprisingly good for television.
Given that it is for the FOX network, it feels a lot like 24 with killer robots (although I wouldn’t argue with the possibility that Keifer Sutherland might be a killer robot).
But if this is like 24, it is like 24 when it was still vaguely coherent. Although I am not quite sure how they will keep up with the pace that they have set in the premiere episode
(let alone keep a budget to afford those special effects on a weekly basis), I am curious to see how it will be done, because there is no question that this show will have a massive audience
both mainstream and within sci-fi fan culture. (Notably, the presence of Summer Glau of Firefly fame should draw in some fans of that show.)
That said, I find its early pirated release particularly compelling since it is not technically supposed to air for another six months.
Was its release really the network’s doing? Or perhaps someone involved in the production leaked it to create enough buzz for an earlier release?
I have no idea, but I find it curious that The Sarah Connor Chronicles was found among the collection of fall releases.

Lipstick Jungle

Remember Sex and the City? Yeah. So do the producers of Lipstick Jungle. It’s pretty similar, in a one-hour format with a now-typical television mix of melodrama and comedy (“comodroma”? “melody”?).
The premise is the intersecting stories of three uber-powerful women in New York City who (shockingly!) are trying to balance their work and love lives.
It has the potential to improve, but for the most part I found this show whiny and vaguely offensive:
the theme seems to be that while women can be successful and powerful at work, they are still women and too obsessed with their emotions.
This NBC show will probably last for a few seasons only because the twenty and thirty-something women miss their weekly fix of Sex and the City.
And I’m pretty sure that any leak of this show was not really meant for the pirate-folk.

Reaper

Imagine Kevin Smith directed a television show for the CW. Wait… you don’t have to. Reaper is that very show, and it manages to meet the expectations of such a collaboration.
(And I’m not just saying that because in general Kevin Smith’s pathetic directing and horrible writing generally make me want to gouge my eyes out.)
The premise? Blah blah some stupid kid’s parents sell his soul to the devil before he is born… blah blah on his 21st birthday the devil gives him a job as an escaped-soul bounty hunter.
No, really. In the first episode he collects a soul in a magical Dirt Devil (which, I might add, is the most misguided product placement I’ve ever seen).
I would like to say it was the worst writing I have seen on a TV show in years, but sadly I just sat through the premiere of Cavemen… so lets just say second worst.
While the bad writing makes me hope that Reaper doesn’t have a shot in hell, I’m pretty sure the folks at the CW are illiterate anyhow and I suspect that it will be popular with teen boys
(who, of course, don’t tend to be a very stable television demographic, so maybe it won’t last). But here’s hoping that it won’t last more than six episodes.
It wouldn’t surprise me if this show was purposefully pirated by a studio someone with hopes of getting the attention of this demographic.

Chuck

As I was watching the premiere of the new NBC show Chuck I found myself constantly asking one question:
If networks wanted to make a show about a dorky, quirky geekboy who gets super-human powers and ends up working for the government why the fuck didn’t someone just bring back
Jake 2.0?
Because, without question, Chuck, a show about a tech support guy who gets all of the information from the NSA and CIA burrowed into his brain through an email (!?!) was inferior to Jake 2.0
(a UPN show from a few years back in which a tech support guy working for the NSA is infused with nanotechnology and becomes super human).
Chuck, unlike Jake, was riddled with logical flaws, mediocre writing, and uninteresting characters. My highest praise was that there was a half-decent car chase.
I would be surprised if Chuck, like his predecessor Jake, does not last very long.
In terms of it’s relationship to piracy, I am not sure whether or not this was pirated on purpose by NBC (if so, I would have to wonder why given the quality!).
What hits me as curious is that the whole show seems to be making a meta-statement on piracy: Chuck’s affliction is ultimately due to what could be pared down to an “illegal download.”
If this is true, the show can be interpreted as a warning to pirates suggesting, “be careful what you hack…” Which makes a pirated version of it somewhat interesting by its own right.
Incidentally: when Chuck found out he had superhuman powers he did not cry in a bathtub like NBC’s Jaime Sommers did. Just saying.

Cavemen

Cavemen ate my soul. Sigh.
This is a television sitcom based on the characters from the Geico commercials (which had already offended me in its 15 second slots so you can only imagine what 22 minutes did to me).
Cavemen seems to be attempting to tackle racism.
While at least no laugh track was forced on the audience (or, at least, not in this early version), the writing was appalling and the show was highly offensive on several levels.
I don’t know what the ABC executives were thinking, but I suspect it will be off the air in time for a bad reality TV show as a mid-season replacement.
I have to imagine it was pirated by mistake, because as far as I’m concerned it was created by mistake.

So what do I make of the hodgepodge of Fall television promises? Not too much, just yet. Television premieres offer a lot of exposition, and it often takes four or five episodes for a good show to create the intimacy necessary for a weekly invitation into my boudoir. But there’s some potential here–perhaps more potential than I’ve seen in this Fall’s film previews. Ultimately I’m nowhere near ready to shoot my television just yet. And the networks? Well, we’ll just see about the networks.

Shira Chess is a doctoral student at RPI who has written extensively on television, gaming, and cultural studies.
Her thesis-lite (En)Gendering the Boob Tube: Technology, Agency, and the Action TV Femme is available on her site at Shiraland.