The first appearance of the Eleventh Doctor premiered in the UK this weekend, as well as several showings at San Francisco’s WonderCon. It doesn’t technically premiere in the US until April 17th, but I saw it and was just blown away, so to heck with the US release date. As Doctor Who is also on my List of Giant Things, I’m taking this opportunity to write up an unscheduled LoGT entry.
Doctor Who has actually undergone several significant shifts since its last Christmas special episode. David Tennant’s reign has come to an end, so a lot of “The Eleventh Hour” was about introducing the new Doctor, played by Matt Smith, and trying to cross the tricky transition from one protagonist into another. Doctor Who is such an odd, unique form of storytelling in this respect – every once in a while, a new actor shows up to take over the main character’s role, and the whole fiction has to continue in the same universe with this new player in its midst. Switching actors happens a fair amount on long-running film mediums, but it’s almost always on the James Bond model: exit Sean Connery, enter Roger Moore, with little comment and very little difference in the essential character. Instead, Doctor Who fictionalizes the new actor’s entrance, usually with great moment and aplomb, and takes each version of the Doctor as an opportunity to start all over again.
Matt Smith and Karen Gillan as the new Doctor Who and his companion, Amy Pond
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It’s List of Giant Things Day!
Today, one of my favorite shows of recent memory, and one that unlike all the previous shows I’ve done on List of Giant Things, I watched as it was originally airing. I did stumble on Battlestar Galactica after the fact of its first premiere and then inhaled the first season on DVD, but after that initial discovery, I was stuck with waiting months and years to find out the end of that story.
I think it’s appropriate and important to talk about endings when thinking about Battlestar Galactica, because its relationship with finality is quite different than a lot of other long shows. This isn’t the case for all genre fiction, but when a show is oriented around a plot that deals with mystery and discovery, the imagined end point forms a crucial and often difficult horizon line from the very beginning. Unlike fiction that uses multiple generations as its device for creating length, it would have been impossible for Battlestar Galactica to continue indefinitely. There are certain questions that the show built into its premise – What do all of the Cylon models look like? Is there such a thing as Earth, and if so, how do we find it? Will humanity survive? Will Cylons survive? – which required an ending in a markedly different sense than a romance plotline. Shows built on generations can continue forever by simply adding new characters, and in the sense of generations, I don’t just mean a family that has children, but any renewable cast of characters: a new senior class at high school, a new administration in the White House, a new bunch of interns in the hospital. Unlike those open, changeable settings, the world of Battlestar is a closed set. These are the humans who survived the apocalypse. These are the thirteen models of humanoid Cylons. Sure, you can discover another ship that managed to survive, or you can learn that there are more models of Cylon than you thought, and the show uses both of those strategies. But you can’t go on like that forever, and at some point, the show has to answer its central questions rather than continue the drama by forever stumbling across an implausible new set of characters. As soon as those questions are resolved, the show is over.
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It’s List of Giant Things Day! (See previously, Twin Peaks and Buffy the Vampire Slayer).
It’s hard to even know where to start with Deadwood. This could easily be a 1,000-word blog post on any number of things about the show: its fascinating adaptation of a specific time and place in American history, its immense network of characters and plotlines, its distinctive and completely idiosyncratic dialogue, the detailed attention to set design and costume… it overwhelms. Ian McShane’s performance alone deserves 1,000 words.
And in truth, that’s the takeaway experience of Deadwood, a sense of an immense amount of stuff crammed into a relatively small container. The show is set in an American frontier town in what will eventually become Kansas, right at the beginning of Deadwood’s gold boom. Every shot of someone walking down the street overflows with people, mud, horses, signs for new businesses, price lists for food and hardware, laundry drying on a line, broken liquor bottles, piles of newspapers, dogs, sacks full of mail, wagons, stands selling food, two guys in a bar fight that’s expanded outside, women emptying chamber pots from balconies, prostitutes leaning up against porch railings soliciting tricks. Even in the camp’s many indoor spaces, rooms are crammed full of things hanging from the ceilings, things littering the floors, lanterns and glasses and pistols piled up on every flat surface. It’s an aesthetic mirrored in the show’s narrative structure, where a single episode can follow twenty-three characters and five plotlines, and even mirrored in the dialogue, which comes spilling out in arcane obscenities and multiple subordinate clauses.
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It’s List of Giant Things day!
Buffy the Vampire Slayer has had one of the strongest presences in academic writing about television, or at least, it did until The Wire was crowned “the best show in television history,” and it became popular to fret over urban violence and the inevitable failures of modern institutions. Do not mistake me – I am all in favor of jumping on the “best show in television history” bandwagon, because The Wire just blows everything else out of the water.
Still, Buffy holds a special place in the development of academic television criticism, because while The Wire was catapulted quite quickly into canonical status (is now the subject of classes at Ivy League universities, has become a benchmark against which all other television is compared, is constantly perceived in relation to Dickens, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, etc. as way of solidifying its high-culture position), Buffy grew into its position slowly, and the whole process was accompanied by persistent navel-gazing. There are dozens of books, but take for example Buffy Meets the Academy, a collection of essays broken into sections: Power and the Buffy Canon, Buffy Meets the Classics, Buffy and the Classroom. My favorite essay titles in the book include “Buffy Never Goes It Alone: The Rhetorical Construction of Sisterhood in the Final Season” and “Buffy’s Insight into Wollstonecraft and Mill” – the text is constantly reaching toward the language and references of a standard critical discussion, but is ever self-conscious about making a popular network television show with an audience of teenage girls its subject.
Buffy became an academic hit largely because it turns several favorite gendered tropes on their heads, and dramatizes the reclamation of the Gothic as an empowering female genre. Where the vampire story traditionally narrates the travails of lovely, victimized women, dangerously attractive vampires, and chaste, heroic male saviors, Buffy re-cast the role of Awesome Vampire Destroyer as a far-from-helpless heroine, known for her roundhouse kicks and her attraction to Bad Dudes. It’s not hard to read all sorts of gender politics, role reversals, high school metaphors and sexual commentary into Buffy. But it needs to defined against not just Gothic genres, but also earlier high school-focused television.
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I’m in the middle of a big project where I’m reading and watching a lot of material (a lot) in the hopes of being able to sit in a room and say something coherent about it all. As a part of that process, I’ve been rewatching a lot of television I haven’t seen in a while, and am trying to sort through what makes it a worthwhile item of discussion, how it connects to other shows, and say something cogent about why this particular show is a relevant part of my List of Giant Things I Need to Read and Watch. (Note: you may think that should have read “Giant List of Things,” but indeed, no. It is a requirement to be Giant in order to be on this list.)
As a part of all this, I’ve decided to take Fridays and write about a show on that List of Giant Things. I spend a little time every day sitting down with a word processing document. Might as well use some of that time for the LoGT instead of The Real Housewives of New York City, ya know what I mean? (Note the second: this does not necessarily mean that I haven’t watched The Real Housewives of New York City. I find Bethenny’s cheekbones mesmerizing.)
So, up first on the LoGT project – Twin Peaks, 1990-1991. Largely produced and created by David Lynch and Mark Frost, although some disputes during season two caused David Lynch to leave until returning to work on the final episode.
I first saw the pilot of Twin Peaks in my college dorm room a few years ago, and I remember watching the synthesized strains of the hypnotic opening credits and rocking back in my chair. “What on earth is this?” I wondered, as a machine slowly rotated around the points of a giant buzz saw, blowing sparks everywhere. The pilot introduces the community, the main characters, and what seems like the central focus of the show. Local high school student Laura Palmer has been murdered, and Agent Dale Cooper and Sheriff Harry S. Truman are going to find out who did it. That first, extended-length episode does essentially what you’d expect, outlining the relationships between Laura’s friend Donna, her boyfriend Bobby, her lover James, and all the other minor characters at the diner, the Great Northern Hotel, the gas station, the sheriff’s department. It’s also intensely melodramatic and returns constantly to the overwrought main theme, which never slips quietly into the background noise, but rather slaps you upside the head with its straining, electronic violin and keyboard anguish. read more…
