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Jan. 15th, 2017 12:14 amBeen rewatching Twin Peaks and Buffy a bit these last months. On one level we overrate them when we put them up with even 2nd-tier modern shows like, say, Fargo or Westworld, but unlike most modern ones they're very good at staying on some level comfort shows. They have both network and prestige virtues, in other words. Shows like Hannibal and Breaking Bad appear to have the family-that's-a-team / team-like-family core that make the earlier model reassuring, but it's telegraphed from early on we're not to trust it - which we aren't. Even The Wire was like this - the cops weren't usually friends. The one close friendship, Bunk and McNulty's, was carefully sidelined by their never being in the main "wire" squad together. Twin Peak of course makes families problematic, but the first sign of any non-comic crack in the core team's (the law enforcement members) long-term support for one another is the scene that ends the series.
Kind of wonder if that's a drama vs. genre distinction, in fact: is there a team we can trust to find their places in a dependable "good guys" network? If not, even if you're in space you have a drama, a story where a home is at stake.
Game of Thrones is concealed old-mode - we understand from the start who the good guys are, and even their precise goodness rankings. They're just never together in more than 2s or 3s. When they are they'll win - in some absurdly costly and tenuous way, so the show again gets credit for being the sort of show it isn't, but still a victory.
Which isn't to say you can't get a read on who's a nice person in the other sort of show, just that reliance on the mutual niceness of a few characters is not the heart of the audience's experience of the show - the emotional equivalent of a spaceship or a superpower.
Team shows are always embarrassed about being that, of course. Pretending that they're not is the one way to create suspense that isn't limited to the fates of Love Boat-style guest stars, e.g. having someone go on a vision quest, or go kind of bad but not very and then go good again, or die but in a nice way and clearly their spirit is still there somehow helping - in dreams, in a clone or some other sort of close replacement).
So anyway, shows that keep you in the spaceship-nest while letting what's disturbing outside it actually disturb in a sense tie their own hands, but may hit a sweet spot for audiences - you get to go out while staying home. Seems weak once there's other options, but in the better '90s shows there's some dignity to it, some risk and reward. Something was being tried.
That's one of the strangest things about art as a whole, I think: whatever has been sought for, risked for, is genuinely worth more than the identical-seeming commodity that has just been ordered off the menu of received possibilities. Doesn't seem worth more, but IS - you can not know that phenomenon X is being represented for the first time, when consuming some old work of art, but you nonetheless feel that a full step has been taken. And it's a rare artist who can make you feel the continuous reality of a mental step forward, a gulf-shot, that they're not taking themself that second. Not entirely unheard of, but not at all common ... and that sort of retro-immersive artistry has costs of its own.
This may help explain something I've always felt confused by - how some people will argue for the supremacy of Artwork X because it was influential, not in the Bloomian sense that influence helps render visible a work's value but as though it somehow constituted it. Maybe they mean this other quality but have trouble articulating it so default to a similar-sounding but essentially irrelevant standard of worth.
(Coming down with an illness, I can feel, but I'll leave this up, mostly to be amused by my own altered state writing. I do that a lot. In part because I'm a bad host, but as much because mine nearly always are to some extent, so I might as well embrace the fact. For those interested, Ambien writing seems to be more popular with readers than most normal-state, as does c. 5-hour sleep debt writing; alcohol writing apparently blows, as does 20+ hour debt writing; pot writing, IIRC, I always liked myself, looking back, but would clearly have been too hard for others to find much in. Makes it ideal to plunder for later use, probably. Flu et al. writing depends entirely on what sort and stage of illness. Melatonin writing's another wild card, since there's a calm-but-awake stretch descending to the drowsy point, and if you don't succumb then there's a mind-opening stretch, then a wandering in and out of consciousness where what ends up getting typed will tend to be either crabbed or simplistic, basically some summary or goal-point of what you'd written before where you don't feel your task and waking day are over till you've typed it. Part of the point of writing is to be in different ways ... attending to how one experiences the performance / performs the experience of it differently on these occasions is probably a cheap shortcut to that.)
Kind of wonder if that's a drama vs. genre distinction, in fact: is there a team we can trust to find their places in a dependable "good guys" network? If not, even if you're in space you have a drama, a story where a home is at stake.
Game of Thrones is concealed old-mode - we understand from the start who the good guys are, and even their precise goodness rankings. They're just never together in more than 2s or 3s. When they are they'll win - in some absurdly costly and tenuous way, so the show again gets credit for being the sort of show it isn't, but still a victory.
Which isn't to say you can't get a read on who's a nice person in the other sort of show, just that reliance on the mutual niceness of a few characters is not the heart of the audience's experience of the show - the emotional equivalent of a spaceship or a superpower.
Team shows are always embarrassed about being that, of course. Pretending that they're not is the one way to create suspense that isn't limited to the fates of Love Boat-style guest stars, e.g. having someone go on a vision quest, or go kind of bad but not very and then go good again, or die but in a nice way and clearly their spirit is still there somehow helping - in dreams, in a clone or some other sort of close replacement).
So anyway, shows that keep you in the spaceship-nest while letting what's disturbing outside it actually disturb in a sense tie their own hands, but may hit a sweet spot for audiences - you get to go out while staying home. Seems weak once there's other options, but in the better '90s shows there's some dignity to it, some risk and reward. Something was being tried.
That's one of the strangest things about art as a whole, I think: whatever has been sought for, risked for, is genuinely worth more than the identical-seeming commodity that has just been ordered off the menu of received possibilities. Doesn't seem worth more, but IS - you can not know that phenomenon X is being represented for the first time, when consuming some old work of art, but you nonetheless feel that a full step has been taken. And it's a rare artist who can make you feel the continuous reality of a mental step forward, a gulf-shot, that they're not taking themself that second. Not entirely unheard of, but not at all common ... and that sort of retro-immersive artistry has costs of its own.
This may help explain something I've always felt confused by - how some people will argue for the supremacy of Artwork X because it was influential, not in the Bloomian sense that influence helps render visible a work's value but as though it somehow constituted it. Maybe they mean this other quality but have trouble articulating it so default to a similar-sounding but essentially irrelevant standard of worth.
(Coming down with an illness, I can feel, but I'll leave this up, mostly to be amused by my own altered state writing. I do that a lot. In part because I'm a bad host, but as much because mine nearly always are to some extent, so I might as well embrace the fact. For those interested, Ambien writing seems to be more popular with readers than most normal-state, as does c. 5-hour sleep debt writing; alcohol writing apparently blows, as does 20+ hour debt writing; pot writing, IIRC, I always liked myself, looking back, but would clearly have been too hard for others to find much in. Makes it ideal to plunder for later use, probably. Flu et al. writing depends entirely on what sort and stage of illness. Melatonin writing's another wild card, since there's a calm-but-awake stretch descending to the drowsy point, and if you don't succumb then there's a mind-opening stretch, then a wandering in and out of consciousness where what ends up getting typed will tend to be either crabbed or simplistic, basically some summary or goal-point of what you'd written before where you don't feel your task and waking day are over till you've typed it. Part of the point of writing is to be in different ways ... attending to how one experiences the performance / performs the experience of it differently on these occasions is probably a cheap shortcut to that.)
