I mentioned Galavant earlier; this winter, early spring, whatever this season is in this post-season realm of post-television television, it became the comedy I most looked forward to. I'm not sure if second season is necessarily better than the first -- they're hard to compare -- so much as that more of a spotlight is given to my favorite character, Timothy Omundson's King Richard. While Karen David's Isabella was essentially the deuteragonist of the first season, her role was somewhat reduced in second season -- my only complaint -- with Richard assuming that role, and Galavant and Richard's quest often taking the form of a buddy comedy in the same way that Galavant and Isabella's in first season followed the trope of the guy who falls for his platonic female friend while trying to impress/win back/rescue his putative love interest.
Even apart from the music itself, it's a very smart and clever show, very playful and sometimes arch, right down to Kylie Minogue playing the Queen of the Enchanted Forest, which turns out to be a gay bar. Please let that be a recurring role.
But as good as everyone else is, Richard is the highlight. Richard is amazing. Richard is one of my favorite characters in TV comedy.
Speaking of which -- the other show I find myself looking forward to every week is New Girl, which I would not have believed when it premiered. I openly scorned this show in its first season, having absolutely hated the pilot. When Jake Johnson started showing up in movies I liked, it pissed me off that he was stuck in a shitty show like New Girl. But I would catch pieces of episodes because we didn't have a DVR yet and it was paired with some other show I watched -- Mindy Project, maybe? -- and in time I started watching for Max Greenfield's Schmidt. And before long I was just watching, period, and tolerating Zooey Deschanel's Jess. And since then, either Jess has become less of an obnoxiously precious pixie or I've become used to her, I don't know. Greenfield and Johnson were my main reasons to watch, but, video-game style, the writers have unlocked the secrets to the comedy of everybody else over time, and my favorite scenes are often classic Winston and Cece mess-arounds. It was never that Lamorne Morris and Hannah Simone weren't funny, just that the writers couldn't figure out how to write Winston consistently -- and then sort of made that the point -- and Cece's role as Jess's best friend or Schmidt's crush sometimes made her more plot device than character. Those problems seem to be in the past.
It's not on the level of Happy Endings, Community, or Parks and Rec, don't get me wrong -- nothing at that level seems to be on the schedule right now. Although as far as shows that have the potential to get there, The Grinder turned out to be a hell of a lot funnier than I expected it to be. I don't really understand the Arrested Development comparisons I've seen some people make -- I think you need to rewatch Arrested Development if you think any show can be compared to it -- but:
a) the cast is so fucking solid, and it says a lot about Mary Elizabeth Ellis (the Waitress on Always Sunny) and Natalie Morales (The Middleman, Trophy Wife) that they fit in fine with veterans like Rob Lowe, Fred Savage (who is doing really great work here), and William Devane. Timothy Olyphant's recurring role as himself contributes so much both to the show and to Rob Lowe's character that part of me kind of hopes Tim-O doesn't get his own show and becomes a regular here? I knew he could be funny, but he is perfectly cast here.
b) the show is just meta enough without being a parody, a satire, a send-up, whatever. Actor who played lawyer on not-at-all believable TV show moves back home after his show ends, joins the family law firm in non-lawyer capacity, overshadows his hard-working brother by treating every case like one of his episodes. It's like ... what that Disney movie Bolt was supposed to be. And of course, every episode starts with the family watching an episode of the show-within-a-show.
Everyone is good, and the writing is solid, but the show is absolutely dependent on Rob Lowe's ability to sell his character, and he pulls it off. The Emmys ignored him on Parks, but maybe this will change things.
Meanwhile, off in superhero-world, Supergirl continues to improve, although it also continues to borrow more and more elements from Superman -- having already made Jimmy (James) Olsen part of the cast, they've now had a Toyman episode, introduced Bizarro (and it's Bizarro Supergirl, not Bizarro Superman), and written Max Lord as just a Lex Luthor who hits on Kara's sister instead of on Lois Lane.
Legends of Tomorrow has a boring name but a fun premise -- superheroes and supervillains culled from the Flash and Arrow shows are gathered by Rip Hunter to bounce around in time trying to stop immortal bad dude Vandal Savage. Wentworth Miller's Captain Cold and Caity Lotz's Canary are the standouts here, though I love that Rory from Dr Who is playing a Time Lord now -- but man, the fatal flaw of the show is that the guy playing Vandal Savage is just not good!
I've just looked him up, he's a Danish actor, and maybe in his native language he's a better actor, but here he's a) too campy to take seriously and b) this may be like ... voic-ist or something ... but his voice is simply too high-pitched for him to be a compelling evil immortal mastermind. It's a comic book show. There are conventions to be followed. Maybe if he were a better actor he could pull it off or if the writing were great it wouldn't matter, but in the show as it stands, it matters. Dude is just not convincing me that he's a threat to a box of kittens, much less to this time machine full of superfolks.
In other dramas, I really hope this turns out to be the final season of The Good Wife. As you may have heard, the showrunner-creators are leaving one way or the other (remaining as uninvolved producers) but CBS wants to sally forth if they can get the actors to stay. Between Peter's bid for the presidency, Alicia's solo venture, Eli telling Alicia about that thing that time ... this feels like a proper final season. This feels like time. I love the show, I love Eli Gold, I love Diane Lockhart, I think they did a great job adding the improbably named Cush Jumbo to the cast, and I love all these crazy judges and opposing attorneys, but it's time to either move on or make a spinoff starring the fantastic Carrie Preston.
I've been altogether deeply disappointed by Sleepy Hollow, a show I vocally championed in its first two seasons, this year. It simply doesn't feel like the same show, and I let it languish on the DVR until it feels like we have to watch it.
American Crime Story: The People vs. O.J. is only one episode in, but it seems like it might be ... really good? Caitlin had to convince me this would be worth watching, but she was right. Maybe it helps that the show actually originated outside of Ry-Murpland and was brought into the fold after development had begun, I don't know. I guess it explains why Evan Peters isn't playing Kato Kaelin, anyway.
The Sci-Fi Channel, which I think is now called Syfy or SyFy or sYfY or essWHYeffWHY or some fucking thing, has adapted Lev Grossman's Magicians series, which is an interesting thing. I had some issues with the books, and I have some issues with the show, but it turns out they are not even the same issues!
Nevermind the issues with the books, by and large -- the biggest one was that I didn't like the main character, Quentin, very much. So far that is mitigated somewhat in the show by rearranging the presentation of the story a bit so that we get Julia's story at the same time as Quentin's instead of hearing about it later in flashback.
The Magicians is like an adult version of Harry Potter meets Narnia: magic is real but, as in those books, hardly anyone realizes it, and as in the Potterverse, its proper use is taught at special schools. The first book begins with Quentin finding out about and attending Brakebills, one such school -- unlike Harry Potter, this is a college, not a boarding school for berobed tots, so you have drunken sorcery and whatnot going on. Which is great! It's fun!
And that's my main issue with the show right there: it moves FAST. In the books, the "meets Narnia" part doesn't happen right away, but the show introduces the Narnia analogue of Fillory immediately and is rushing toward it. It seems to me that if you have the television rights to "the grown-up version of a Harry Potter type school for college kids, where they drink and screw and stuff," and there are only three books in the series, the most marketable thing to do is to linger at the school for as long as possible. Spend at least a season showing us what normal life at a college learning magic is like, because surely that is fascinating and challenging and dramatic on its own, right?
But the show doesn't seem interested in doing that, and it feels like dramatic potential squandered.
It's doing a decent job of what it is interested in -- calling it the best Sci Fi Channel show since Battlestar Galactica is faint praise, but nevertheless -- with the other key problem being that the most interesting female role, Alice, has been either underwritten, badly miscast, or both. I think it's a little of both, because I can't imagine anyone who hasn't read the books watching this and thinking of her as the most interesting of these women. Again, it's a shame -- squandered potential, because the book version is a great character, and this is only slightly made up for by the fact that they are doing better by Julia (so far).
Showing posts with label superheroes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label superheroes. Show all posts
Saturday, February 6, 2016
Wednesday, December 9, 2015
jessica jones and the rest of the best
2015 may be one of the best years in television. Though overall weak in comedy, it nevertheless included the final season of Parks and Recreation, which you can either read as standing in for the series' excellence as a whole, or you can admit that the final season had a lot of weaker moments that were made up for with an excellent finale; spectacular second seasons of Review and Broad City; a strong season of Louie; Mindy and Casual on Hulu; Kimmy Schmidt!; Mom transitioning at some point from "the watchable Chuck Lorre show" to "a show that deals sincerely not only with addiction but with loss, dysfunction, and the one thing sitcoms hardly ever touch, consequences"; some fantastic stuff on Peep Show; genuine explorations of depression in Bojack Horseman and You're the Worst; Aziz Ansari's Netflix comedy Master of None, one of the best shows of the year; and new best family sitcom, Fresh Off the Boat.
And that's in the area where 2015 was weakest. Okay, maybe I need to rephrase "weak in comedy" to "weak in network sitcoms."
In drama, you had the final seasons of Mad Men and Justified (and it might well have been the best season of Justified, or at least the best one without Margo Martindale), a season of Rectify that seems to be pushing us toward the end, an especially daring and emotional season of The Americans -- and any one of these shows could be fairly nominated as The Best Show Ever -- and on top of all that, you have Fargo and The Leftovers, the two most exciting and interesting new shows of last year (or two of the three, depending on how you felt about True Detective), managing to produce second seasons that are leaps and bounds ahead of their premiere seasons.
And then. And then! And then you have Jessica Jones.
I've been much less patient with other superhero shows since watching Jessica Jones. Supergirl is light entertainment at best, and burdening a female character with the baggage of the CW-model superhero show somehow feels even more belittling, especially when -- unlike with The Flash -- this is a character who has had her powers for years. The fact that they had an episode in which a plot point revolved around the trouble she was having keeping her powers in check, when she'd been doing that 24/7 for the decade-plus before the pilot, just made no sense. And even The Flash, which has had time to get its sea legs, just feels second-rate now in comparison.
Jessica Jones, as you've already heard, is the first serious superhero show, the first cable-quality superhero show. Daredevil Schmaredevil.
What made me blog about it, though, other than to just mention it in this "best of 2015" context, was a headline that called her the first female version of the cable drama antihero, which spectacularly misses the point. By cable drama antihero, we mean the protagonists of the recent Golden Age of TV -- Don Draper, Tony Soprano, the asshole protagonists. But The Sopranos is a show about how people don't change, maybe can't change -- arguably you can formulate it even more cynically and say it's a show about how people don't improve. And Mad Men certainly isn't heavily invested in reforming Draper.
Jessica Jones isn't about indulging in being an asshole or celebrating the Heisenbergness of Walter White. Jessica Jones is about trauma and responses to trauma. It has more in common with First Blood or Billy Jack -- or noir antecedents like Out of the Past -- than it does with Mad Men. Like those protagonists, Jessica is prickly, just wants to be left alone -- even though she's not genuinely better off left alone -- and you will regret it if you push her. But she gets better. Because this isn't a male "I can kick everybody's ass in this room" fantasy, either. This isn't about the pleasure of being mean. It's about, to some extent, the reasons for becoming mean.
But it's also not just about Jessica. One of the things I like about iZombie is that even in its first season, it took some risks in having there be real consequences to the usual superhero tropes (like Buffy, iZombie isn't a superhero show, but only in the sense that Liv doesn't have a costumed identity or public reputation; the tropes are otherwise all in play). Jessica Jones, which spends less time on case-of-the-week plots, makes those consequences much more central.
I don't want to spoil much. The supporting cast includes Jessica's friend from childhood, Trish Walker (better known as Patsy Walker to comic book fans); bartender and future Netflix show star Luke Cage; and her various neighbors. Jessica's life and choices, which are haunted by her torment a year ago under the influence of the mind-controlling Purple Man, have a real impact on all of these people. (Trish is played by Rachael Taylor, who was on the awful-looking Crisis last year but who struck Caitlin and me as much more intelligent and interesting than you'd guess based on that show when she guested on some late night talk show we were watching -- probably Ferguson -- and she's good enough here that I'd happily watch her in her own spinoff.)
I've talked in other blogs about being a victim of sexual abuse myself, and dealing with that in therapy for years, and while there are key differences between childhood and adulthood trauma -- not to mention the unimaginable trauma of mind control -- many of the experiences of post-event trauma are the same (or at least selected off a shared menu, as it were), and so there was a lot I could relate to here, a lot that made the first few episodes especially -- where it's necessarily to really show where Jessica's headspace is -- hard to get through.
To say that rape and other violence against women is common fodder for TV drama is like saying that many comedy scenes take place in living rooms with only three walls. What is rare, and it is especially shameful and disturbing that it is so rare given just how frequently, how relentlessly, that violence is portrayed, is an actual exploration of the aftermath of that violence.
Not the boyfriend or husband who's motivated by avenging his wife, girlfriend, mother, daughter, or family.
Not the cop who's going to get the son of a bitch who did this, and who maybe keeps thinking about his own wife, girlfriend, mother, or daughter who also died.
Not the advocate or activist or other suit who's like, we gotta do this thing, we gotta fix this thing, we gotta clean up this thing over here, and we gotta do it for Some Lady From Act One! Because That Lady is DEAD!
If you think this isn't important, if you think representation and viewpoint don't matter, if you're fine with every story about violence being about the cop or the boyfriend or the dad who just avenges dead daughters all the time, if you think the young women growing up and sneaking peeks at past-their-bedtime television aren't affected by seeing that the third-hour-of-primetime job they can look forward to when they grow up is Dying And Providing A Serious Man With A Serious Motive, I don't want you to read my blog. I don't have any conversations to have with you. I just checked. I'm all out.
Revenge is not the only way to tell the story of what happens after trauma. It's not even the best way! But letting the woman be the survivor-hero instead of the motive-prop was a fantastic move.
Jessica Jones isn't just about that.
It's also about how exactly one goes about being a crimefighter in a world that has the Avengers but only the movie Avengers -- and the movie Avengers aren't actually superheroes. The movie Avengers are these guys who have come in a couple times to stop weird intergalactic and/or robotic menaces, but they aren't comic book superheroes who actually stop crimes or fight terrorism or ... do superhero shit. They're more like a special special super-special special ops military force. (How are they going to do Civil War when secret identities have been almost completely irrelevant to the franchise thus far? Anyway...)
It's also about the difficulty that a mind-controlling supervillain introduces to the conversation in a world aware that a handful of people like the Hulk and Jessica exist, but not yet jaded to the idea of superpowers (and a world without access to the X-Men intellectual property, so you can't have Professor X come in and testify about mind control either).
It's a show that's able to get into the nuances of a newly superpower-aware world in a way that the movies -- which largely take place thirty stories above the people having these conversations and are full of explosions that drown them out -- never will.
If you're familiar with the comics Jessica Jones is based on, much is changed because much must be. Alias -- no relation to the TV show, how's that for confusing? -- was exactly the kind of comic that you only write, you only publish, because there is a creaky and well-worn Marvel Universe already in place, a universe where you can introduce a character and say "by the way, she used to be an Avenger, and she's good friends with Spider-Woman and Carol Danvers, and some of her cases involve the third Spider-Woman and Speedball and J Jonah Jameson, and also she goes on a date with Ant-Man, the second one," and it all works, and it works even for readers who don't know those characters chapter and verse, because the nature of that particular comics universe is that it doesn't take long to realize it's crowded and it's old. It's like when you start watching General Hospital for the first time, and you don't know anybody or anything, but you don't expect them to slow down and recap it all for you either. You just understand that this density, this dogearedness where you can see the paintings behind the paintings behind the paintings because the canvas has been scraped clean so many times, is part of the show.
The TV show can't do that. It had to lose a lot of what's in the comic. Somehow it lost all that and still got to the heart of what was best about the comic, what was most televisionable about the comic, and then it made that part even better.
Other best things this year! non-television division.
Movie-wise it's sort of pointless to weigh in: most of what will be nominated for the 2015 awards won't play near me either until the new year or ever, after all. I think It Follows and Mad Max were my favorite movies of the year, with an honorable mention for the surprisingly good Unfriended, while Poltergeist and She's Funny That Way were the biggest disappointments. The Visit was well worth seeing in theaters, and Final Girls was very smart. Inside Out lands somewhere in the B minuses as far as Pixar productions go, and seems to cling so closely to their formula that I wonder if they'll ever make another Up or Wall-E, or even another Incredibles.
But like I said: tons of the good stuff, I won't see until next year. The new Kaufman leaps immediately to mind, but I didn't get round to seeing Mistress America yet either.
Musically, the big surprise for me was that Calexico released a new album and it wasn't my favorite album of the year, unlike Algiers and Carried to Dust. But I choose to see that as reflecting how much I liked my actual favorites -- Glen Hansard's new one, Bop English, the Weepies. It was very very nice to see new albums by Robert Forster and the Dave Rawlings Machine, both of which are fantastic, though I wish the Forster were available on fucking CD, for heaven's sake. Beach Slang had the most exciting rock album in a while, and The Soft Moon stood out in the increasingly crowded field of Moods for Moderns nostalgia.
Another seeming disappointment that wasn't actually disappointing was the new Juliana Hatfield Three album -- a terrific album, it's just that a number of the songs are new recordings of tunes she'd previously recorded for her solo albums or the Minor Alps side project. Still, it's a minor quibble for an artist I've loved since the Blake Babies days, and who has only gotten better in the 21st century.
I have a Spotify playlist, more or less ordered, of my favorite 2015 albums.
There are a lot of ways in which Afterlife with Archie and The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina are the best comics coming out right now ... it's just that they so rarely come out, and I have trouble getting over my frustration with that. Especially when new titles continue to be announced despite the publisher's inability to properly service even these two. Still, on the rare occasion when an issue does surface, it's always fantastic.
Thankfully, Bitch Planet comes out more often and makes me feel a little okay about Kelly Sue DeConnick no longer writing Captain Marvel.
The Marvel line in general is experiencing a creative peak unlike anything I've seen in a long, long time (while, simultaneously, DC has become relentlessly boring apart from the ending of Fables). Dan Slott and Mike Allred's Silver Surfer is my personal favorite, and the just-begun Dr Strange series may equal it, especially if Bachalo remains as artist (other than Sienkiewicz or P Craig Russell, who since Ditko would you rather see doing Dr Strange?), but Ms Marvel, Spider-Woman, and the recently wrapped She-Hulk have all been great, and the Star Wars comics are even good. Even the Black Knight and Red Wolf comics are off to a good start, for heaven's sake.
And that's in the area where 2015 was weakest. Okay, maybe I need to rephrase "weak in comedy" to "weak in network sitcoms."
In drama, you had the final seasons of Mad Men and Justified (and it might well have been the best season of Justified, or at least the best one without Margo Martindale), a season of Rectify that seems to be pushing us toward the end, an especially daring and emotional season of The Americans -- and any one of these shows could be fairly nominated as The Best Show Ever -- and on top of all that, you have Fargo and The Leftovers, the two most exciting and interesting new shows of last year (or two of the three, depending on how you felt about True Detective), managing to produce second seasons that are leaps and bounds ahead of their premiere seasons.
And then. And then! And then you have Jessica Jones.
I've been much less patient with other superhero shows since watching Jessica Jones. Supergirl is light entertainment at best, and burdening a female character with the baggage of the CW-model superhero show somehow feels even more belittling, especially when -- unlike with The Flash -- this is a character who has had her powers for years. The fact that they had an episode in which a plot point revolved around the trouble she was having keeping her powers in check, when she'd been doing that 24/7 for the decade-plus before the pilot, just made no sense. And even The Flash, which has had time to get its sea legs, just feels second-rate now in comparison.
Jessica Jones, as you've already heard, is the first serious superhero show, the first cable-quality superhero show. Daredevil Schmaredevil.
What made me blog about it, though, other than to just mention it in this "best of 2015" context, was a headline that called her the first female version of the cable drama antihero, which spectacularly misses the point. By cable drama antihero, we mean the protagonists of the recent Golden Age of TV -- Don Draper, Tony Soprano, the asshole protagonists. But The Sopranos is a show about how people don't change, maybe can't change -- arguably you can formulate it even more cynically and say it's a show about how people don't improve. And Mad Men certainly isn't heavily invested in reforming Draper.
Jessica Jones isn't about indulging in being an asshole or celebrating the Heisenbergness of Walter White. Jessica Jones is about trauma and responses to trauma. It has more in common with First Blood or Billy Jack -- or noir antecedents like Out of the Past -- than it does with Mad Men. Like those protagonists, Jessica is prickly, just wants to be left alone -- even though she's not genuinely better off left alone -- and you will regret it if you push her. But she gets better. Because this isn't a male "I can kick everybody's ass in this room" fantasy, either. This isn't about the pleasure of being mean. It's about, to some extent, the reasons for becoming mean.
But it's also not just about Jessica. One of the things I like about iZombie is that even in its first season, it took some risks in having there be real consequences to the usual superhero tropes (like Buffy, iZombie isn't a superhero show, but only in the sense that Liv doesn't have a costumed identity or public reputation; the tropes are otherwise all in play). Jessica Jones, which spends less time on case-of-the-week plots, makes those consequences much more central.
I don't want to spoil much. The supporting cast includes Jessica's friend from childhood, Trish Walker (better known as Patsy Walker to comic book fans); bartender and future Netflix show star Luke Cage; and her various neighbors. Jessica's life and choices, which are haunted by her torment a year ago under the influence of the mind-controlling Purple Man, have a real impact on all of these people. (Trish is played by Rachael Taylor, who was on the awful-looking Crisis last year but who struck Caitlin and me as much more intelligent and interesting than you'd guess based on that show when she guested on some late night talk show we were watching -- probably Ferguson -- and she's good enough here that I'd happily watch her in her own spinoff.)
I've talked in other blogs about being a victim of sexual abuse myself, and dealing with that in therapy for years, and while there are key differences between childhood and adulthood trauma -- not to mention the unimaginable trauma of mind control -- many of the experiences of post-event trauma are the same (or at least selected off a shared menu, as it were), and so there was a lot I could relate to here, a lot that made the first few episodes especially -- where it's necessarily to really show where Jessica's headspace is -- hard to get through.
To say that rape and other violence against women is common fodder for TV drama is like saying that many comedy scenes take place in living rooms with only three walls. What is rare, and it is especially shameful and disturbing that it is so rare given just how frequently, how relentlessly, that violence is portrayed, is an actual exploration of the aftermath of that violence.
Not the boyfriend or husband who's motivated by avenging his wife, girlfriend, mother, daughter, or family.
Not the cop who's going to get the son of a bitch who did this, and who maybe keeps thinking about his own wife, girlfriend, mother, or daughter who also died.
Not the advocate or activist or other suit who's like, we gotta do this thing, we gotta fix this thing, we gotta clean up this thing over here, and we gotta do it for Some Lady From Act One! Because That Lady is DEAD!
If you think this isn't important, if you think representation and viewpoint don't matter, if you're fine with every story about violence being about the cop or the boyfriend or the dad who just avenges dead daughters all the time, if you think the young women growing up and sneaking peeks at past-their-bedtime television aren't affected by seeing that the third-hour-of-primetime job they can look forward to when they grow up is Dying And Providing A Serious Man With A Serious Motive, I don't want you to read my blog. I don't have any conversations to have with you. I just checked. I'm all out.
Revenge is not the only way to tell the story of what happens after trauma. It's not even the best way! But letting the woman be the survivor-hero instead of the motive-prop was a fantastic move.
Jessica Jones isn't just about that.
It's also about how exactly one goes about being a crimefighter in a world that has the Avengers but only the movie Avengers -- and the movie Avengers aren't actually superheroes. The movie Avengers are these guys who have come in a couple times to stop weird intergalactic and/or robotic menaces, but they aren't comic book superheroes who actually stop crimes or fight terrorism or ... do superhero shit. They're more like a special special super-special special ops military force. (How are they going to do Civil War when secret identities have been almost completely irrelevant to the franchise thus far? Anyway...)
It's also about the difficulty that a mind-controlling supervillain introduces to the conversation in a world aware that a handful of people like the Hulk and Jessica exist, but not yet jaded to the idea of superpowers (and a world without access to the X-Men intellectual property, so you can't have Professor X come in and testify about mind control either).
It's a show that's able to get into the nuances of a newly superpower-aware world in a way that the movies -- which largely take place thirty stories above the people having these conversations and are full of explosions that drown them out -- never will.
If you're familiar with the comics Jessica Jones is based on, much is changed because much must be. Alias -- no relation to the TV show, how's that for confusing? -- was exactly the kind of comic that you only write, you only publish, because there is a creaky and well-worn Marvel Universe already in place, a universe where you can introduce a character and say "by the way, she used to be an Avenger, and she's good friends with Spider-Woman and Carol Danvers, and some of her cases involve the third Spider-Woman and Speedball and J Jonah Jameson, and also she goes on a date with Ant-Man, the second one," and it all works, and it works even for readers who don't know those characters chapter and verse, because the nature of that particular comics universe is that it doesn't take long to realize it's crowded and it's old. It's like when you start watching General Hospital for the first time, and you don't know anybody or anything, but you don't expect them to slow down and recap it all for you either. You just understand that this density, this dogearedness where you can see the paintings behind the paintings behind the paintings because the canvas has been scraped clean so many times, is part of the show.
The TV show can't do that. It had to lose a lot of what's in the comic. Somehow it lost all that and still got to the heart of what was best about the comic, what was most televisionable about the comic, and then it made that part even better.
Other best things this year! non-television division.
Movie-wise it's sort of pointless to weigh in: most of what will be nominated for the 2015 awards won't play near me either until the new year or ever, after all. I think It Follows and Mad Max were my favorite movies of the year, with an honorable mention for the surprisingly good Unfriended, while Poltergeist and She's Funny That Way were the biggest disappointments. The Visit was well worth seeing in theaters, and Final Girls was very smart. Inside Out lands somewhere in the B minuses as far as Pixar productions go, and seems to cling so closely to their formula that I wonder if they'll ever make another Up or Wall-E, or even another Incredibles.
But like I said: tons of the good stuff, I won't see until next year. The new Kaufman leaps immediately to mind, but I didn't get round to seeing Mistress America yet either.
Musically, the big surprise for me was that Calexico released a new album and it wasn't my favorite album of the year, unlike Algiers and Carried to Dust. But I choose to see that as reflecting how much I liked my actual favorites -- Glen Hansard's new one, Bop English, the Weepies. It was very very nice to see new albums by Robert Forster and the Dave Rawlings Machine, both of which are fantastic, though I wish the Forster were available on fucking CD, for heaven's sake. Beach Slang had the most exciting rock album in a while, and The Soft Moon stood out in the increasingly crowded field of Moods for Moderns nostalgia.
Another seeming disappointment that wasn't actually disappointing was the new Juliana Hatfield Three album -- a terrific album, it's just that a number of the songs are new recordings of tunes she'd previously recorded for her solo albums or the Minor Alps side project. Still, it's a minor quibble for an artist I've loved since the Blake Babies days, and who has only gotten better in the 21st century.
I have a Spotify playlist, more or less ordered, of my favorite 2015 albums.
There are a lot of ways in which Afterlife with Archie and The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina are the best comics coming out right now ... it's just that they so rarely come out, and I have trouble getting over my frustration with that. Especially when new titles continue to be announced despite the publisher's inability to properly service even these two. Still, on the rare occasion when an issue does surface, it's always fantastic.
Thankfully, Bitch Planet comes out more often and makes me feel a little okay about Kelly Sue DeConnick no longer writing Captain Marvel.
The Marvel line in general is experiencing a creative peak unlike anything I've seen in a long, long time (while, simultaneously, DC has become relentlessly boring apart from the ending of Fables). Dan Slott and Mike Allred's Silver Surfer is my personal favorite, and the just-begun Dr Strange series may equal it, especially if Bachalo remains as artist (other than Sienkiewicz or P Craig Russell, who since Ditko would you rather see doing Dr Strange?), but Ms Marvel, Spider-Woman, and the recently wrapped She-Hulk have all been great, and the Star Wars comics are even good. Even the Black Knight and Red Wolf comics are off to a good start, for heaven's sake.
Wednesday, May 20, 2015
cape fear
One of my first posts on this still-young blog was about superheroes and the general failure of television to compellingly depict them or capture what works about comic books. Since then, the spring season has begun to wrap up and there have been a few significant developments, so it's worth a followup:
The CW-verse
Is there an umbrella term for the CW's DC shows, now that there will be three of them in the fall? They don't seem to share continuity with any of the DC movies or CBS's Supergirl show (I hope I'm wrong about the latter), so "DC TV-verse" doesn't work.
Anyway. Because The Flash crosses over with Arrow a fair bit, I've watched a few more episodes of Arrow, and ... like I said last time round, I just cannot take it seriously. It's like knockoff Nolan. I'm so tired of the idea that "taking superheroes seriously" means making them grim-n-gritty, an idea that was horseshit in the early 90s and is horseshit 20 years later when other media are catching up to comic books.
I know everyone - well, everyone in their forties - fondly remembers Mike Grell's Longbow Hunters, which de-camp-ified Green Arrow and made people stop focusing on ridiculous trick arrows, but just like with Frank Miller's Batman, it worked in part as a palate cleanser from the excesses of camp, and landed at a time when, because of Crisis, no specific view of the character had come into clear focus. There are plenty of ways to do Green Arrow that don't have him grinding his teeth all the fucking time, and the Hard Travellin Heroes stories that focused on Queen's social activism in contrast with Green Lantern the space cop are a perfect example.
Ugh. This Green Arrow would be such a terrible presence on a Justice League. He would just sit in the corner glowering with Batman.
The Flash is much better, thank God. It always got the tone just about right, and the series has become more populated with superheroes and supervillains as the season has gone on, with compelling time travel twists and an excellent villain in the Reverse-Flash. Some of those new superheroes are going off to do the Legends spinoff, so I hope season two continues to create new recurring characters and do the work to make this feel like a show set in a world with superheroes, not just one or two dudes in costumes.
Netflix
Netflix's Marvel experiment -- four solo hero shows followed by a Defenders series teaming them up -- has started. (I gotta say, I wish they were calling it Champions instead of Defenders, because now that they're doing a Dr Strange movie, an ACTUAL Defenders movie with Dr Strange, the Hulk, and -- well, if Fox still has Silver Surfer, then somebody else, maybe even Spider-Man -- would be terrific.)
Man, people went nuts for Daredevil.
I ... like it okay.
I still haven't finished it.
Look, the cast is just right. They assembled the correct pieces. Vincent D'onofrio is especially good as the Kingpin, and Scott Glenn as Stick, but the trio of DD, Foggy, and Karen are a great foundation. There's just a lot of punching.
I mean, yeah, it's an action show, and it's a superhero show where the character doesn't have other offensive powers. But it's a lot of punching. And my attention winds up wandering, and I check my email or I get up to do the dishes or something. It's not 1986 and I'm not watching The A-Team -- punching wears thin after a while.
Is part of the problem that I'm not enough of a Daredevil fan? I don't know. I was a big fan of Frank Miller and Ann Nocenti's runs on the book back in the day, although to recycle a point from Green Arrow -- at the time, part of what I enjoyed about them was how different they were from other superhero comics, and that contrast is no longer in evidence.
But comics-wise, I've always been a bigger fan of the cosmic/weird stuff, along with the Avengers and Spider-Man. Daredevil was probably never in my top ten books at the height of my comics fandom (though also never lower than my top twenty). So maybe I'm just responding at the appropriate level of enthusiasm to a well-made adaptation.
It does play in to my frustration that so many superhero adaptations are just, you know, punching in costumes -- the super powers in evidence here are on about the same level as pulp hero stuff like The Shadow, where I want webshooters and Olympian gods and bio-stings.
The Avengers: Age of Ultron
I won't spoil any specific plot developments. This movie is in that tricky area where it was disappointing while still being good.
The Black Widow criticisms are all absolutely valid, but that's easy for me to say, because I thought she was terribly written in the first Avengers movie. She was moderately better written in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but that movie contributes to the trend of pairing her off -- as a love interest or at least flirting partner -- with a different character in every movie she shows up in.
The movie version of this complicated and interesting comic book character has always been sorely underwritten, and I don't think she was even accidentally underwritten, I think she was created as a cipher who would be available for whatever plot needs became manifest, given that they needed her to appear in a dozen or so movies, filling slightly different needs. They purposefully chose a character without powers -- and therefore without additional special effects budget requirements -- to bridge these many Avengers-verse movies, and paid little attention to her beyond her plot-serving uses. I know the ScarJo version of the character has a devoted following, but I don't pretend to understand why.
She's not the only character who seems to serve the plot more than her own needs, here -- Tony Stark is very important to the movie but for the first time comes across as a character with little existence beyond his plot-use. There are times when the same almost seems true of Thor, but Chris Hemsworth is really underrated in his Marvel work, and ably does more with less.
The new characters are largely good; Scarlet Witch and the Vision are terrific, and I would love to see them in their own movie.
The movie is way too long, and at least some of that bloat is pretty transparently caused by the movie's need to serve multiple masters, which does not bode well for the next Cap or the next Avengers movies (though I am glad Whedon is off the train by then).
Another reason it's too long is that some of the action scenes are way too long and, really, not very interesting. I'm glad a lot of the action minutes are spent saving bystanders, but so many of them are devoted to smashing buildings and Michael Bay shit like that, and it's just boring.
Bonus: iZombie
Okay, it's not a superhero show, and although it's a comic book show, it's a very loose adaptation from what I understand (I haven't read it).
But it handles so many superhero tropes so well, and it's about a character with a secret identity, who is hiding from her loved ones the fact that she developed new powers following a traumatic accident, and that she uses those powers to solve murders and fight bad guys with the same powers as hers. One of the people she's hiding her secrets from is her ex-fiance. So I mean. It's a superhero show.
And it's such a good one.
I don't want to spoil anything. The premise, if you can't piece it together from my Mad Libs, is that Olivia Moore became a zombie after a wild party on a yacht went berzerko, and she took a job as a medical examiner in order to fill her need to eat brains -- without which she gradually becomes dumber and more aggressive, more like the zombies of the movies. (The need to eat brains to stave off zombie-mind is also used to good effect in Marvel Zombies - there you go, another superhero connection!) When she eats brains, she occasionally gains skills or other traits of the deceased for a temporary period, which provides the juice for the "case of the week" plots, as she solves murders and whatnot by drawing on the victims' memories and abilities.
Meanwhile, another zombie is amassing power by turning people into zombies and making them dependent on him to supply their food; Liv's social worker ex stumbles onto this without knowing what he's stumbled onto, when he investigates a rash of missing kids.
There are a lot of things the show does well. It starts out feeling like Veronica Mars, which makes sense -- this is a Rob Thomas show, with a snarky blonde solving crimes. But over the course of the first season, it develops its own identity, and it's doing things shows of this stripe have often veered away from doing: most significantly, Liv's decision to keep her secrets hidden from her ex and others has had real consequences beyond Lois being mad at Clark or Mary Jane dumping Peter. The ethics of the double life are really called into question -- and really, this aspect was there even in the pilot, given that Liv only breaks up with Major because she knows she has these secrets to keep, instead of trying to maintain a relationship and a secret life. It just wasn't clear from the pilot that this dilemma was going to become so important to the show. (To be fair, The Flash has done a better than usual job dealing with the secret life dilemma, too. But it has also given Barry Allen an almost nonexistent social life outside of his work as The Flash, so that the matter of secret-keeping is much more narrowly focused.)
Anyway, it's one of my favorite new shows, and deserves more attention.
The CW-verse
Is there an umbrella term for the CW's DC shows, now that there will be three of them in the fall? They don't seem to share continuity with any of the DC movies or CBS's Supergirl show (I hope I'm wrong about the latter), so "DC TV-verse" doesn't work.
Anyway. Because The Flash crosses over with Arrow a fair bit, I've watched a few more episodes of Arrow, and ... like I said last time round, I just cannot take it seriously. It's like knockoff Nolan. I'm so tired of the idea that "taking superheroes seriously" means making them grim-n-gritty, an idea that was horseshit in the early 90s and is horseshit 20 years later when other media are catching up to comic books.
I know everyone - well, everyone in their forties - fondly remembers Mike Grell's Longbow Hunters, which de-camp-ified Green Arrow and made people stop focusing on ridiculous trick arrows, but just like with Frank Miller's Batman, it worked in part as a palate cleanser from the excesses of camp, and landed at a time when, because of Crisis, no specific view of the character had come into clear focus. There are plenty of ways to do Green Arrow that don't have him grinding his teeth all the fucking time, and the Hard Travellin Heroes stories that focused on Queen's social activism in contrast with Green Lantern the space cop are a perfect example.
Ugh. This Green Arrow would be such a terrible presence on a Justice League. He would just sit in the corner glowering with Batman.
The Flash is much better, thank God. It always got the tone just about right, and the series has become more populated with superheroes and supervillains as the season has gone on, with compelling time travel twists and an excellent villain in the Reverse-Flash. Some of those new superheroes are going off to do the Legends spinoff, so I hope season two continues to create new recurring characters and do the work to make this feel like a show set in a world with superheroes, not just one or two dudes in costumes.
Netflix
Netflix's Marvel experiment -- four solo hero shows followed by a Defenders series teaming them up -- has started. (I gotta say, I wish they were calling it Champions instead of Defenders, because now that they're doing a Dr Strange movie, an ACTUAL Defenders movie with Dr Strange, the Hulk, and -- well, if Fox still has Silver Surfer, then somebody else, maybe even Spider-Man -- would be terrific.)
Man, people went nuts for Daredevil.
I ... like it okay.
I still haven't finished it.
Look, the cast is just right. They assembled the correct pieces. Vincent D'onofrio is especially good as the Kingpin, and Scott Glenn as Stick, but the trio of DD, Foggy, and Karen are a great foundation. There's just a lot of punching.
I mean, yeah, it's an action show, and it's a superhero show where the character doesn't have other offensive powers. But it's a lot of punching. And my attention winds up wandering, and I check my email or I get up to do the dishes or something. It's not 1986 and I'm not watching The A-Team -- punching wears thin after a while.
Is part of the problem that I'm not enough of a Daredevil fan? I don't know. I was a big fan of Frank Miller and Ann Nocenti's runs on the book back in the day, although to recycle a point from Green Arrow -- at the time, part of what I enjoyed about them was how different they were from other superhero comics, and that contrast is no longer in evidence.
But comics-wise, I've always been a bigger fan of the cosmic/weird stuff, along with the Avengers and Spider-Man. Daredevil was probably never in my top ten books at the height of my comics fandom (though also never lower than my top twenty). So maybe I'm just responding at the appropriate level of enthusiasm to a well-made adaptation.
It does play in to my frustration that so many superhero adaptations are just, you know, punching in costumes -- the super powers in evidence here are on about the same level as pulp hero stuff like The Shadow, where I want webshooters and Olympian gods and bio-stings.
The Avengers: Age of Ultron
I won't spoil any specific plot developments. This movie is in that tricky area where it was disappointing while still being good.
The Black Widow criticisms are all absolutely valid, but that's easy for me to say, because I thought she was terribly written in the first Avengers movie. She was moderately better written in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but that movie contributes to the trend of pairing her off -- as a love interest or at least flirting partner -- with a different character in every movie she shows up in.
The movie version of this complicated and interesting comic book character has always been sorely underwritten, and I don't think she was even accidentally underwritten, I think she was created as a cipher who would be available for whatever plot needs became manifest, given that they needed her to appear in a dozen or so movies, filling slightly different needs. They purposefully chose a character without powers -- and therefore without additional special effects budget requirements -- to bridge these many Avengers-verse movies, and paid little attention to her beyond her plot-serving uses. I know the ScarJo version of the character has a devoted following, but I don't pretend to understand why.
She's not the only character who seems to serve the plot more than her own needs, here -- Tony Stark is very important to the movie but for the first time comes across as a character with little existence beyond his plot-use. There are times when the same almost seems true of Thor, but Chris Hemsworth is really underrated in his Marvel work, and ably does more with less.
The new characters are largely good; Scarlet Witch and the Vision are terrific, and I would love to see them in their own movie.
The movie is way too long, and at least some of that bloat is pretty transparently caused by the movie's need to serve multiple masters, which does not bode well for the next Cap or the next Avengers movies (though I am glad Whedon is off the train by then).
Another reason it's too long is that some of the action scenes are way too long and, really, not very interesting. I'm glad a lot of the action minutes are spent saving bystanders, but so many of them are devoted to smashing buildings and Michael Bay shit like that, and it's just boring.
Bonus: iZombie
Okay, it's not a superhero show, and although it's a comic book show, it's a very loose adaptation from what I understand (I haven't read it).
But it handles so many superhero tropes so well, and it's about a character with a secret identity, who is hiding from her loved ones the fact that she developed new powers following a traumatic accident, and that she uses those powers to solve murders and fight bad guys with the same powers as hers. One of the people she's hiding her secrets from is her ex-fiance. So I mean. It's a superhero show.
And it's such a good one.
I don't want to spoil anything. The premise, if you can't piece it together from my Mad Libs, is that Olivia Moore became a zombie after a wild party on a yacht went berzerko, and she took a job as a medical examiner in order to fill her need to eat brains -- without which she gradually becomes dumber and more aggressive, more like the zombies of the movies. (The need to eat brains to stave off zombie-mind is also used to good effect in Marvel Zombies - there you go, another superhero connection!) When she eats brains, she occasionally gains skills or other traits of the deceased for a temporary period, which provides the juice for the "case of the week" plots, as she solves murders and whatnot by drawing on the victims' memories and abilities.
Meanwhile, another zombie is amassing power by turning people into zombies and making them dependent on him to supply their food; Liv's social worker ex stumbles onto this without knowing what he's stumbled onto, when he investigates a rash of missing kids.
There are a lot of things the show does well. It starts out feeling like Veronica Mars, which makes sense -- this is a Rob Thomas show, with a snarky blonde solving crimes. But over the course of the first season, it develops its own identity, and it's doing things shows of this stripe have often veered away from doing: most significantly, Liv's decision to keep her secrets hidden from her ex and others has had real consequences beyond Lois being mad at Clark or Mary Jane dumping Peter. The ethics of the double life are really called into question -- and really, this aspect was there even in the pilot, given that Liv only breaks up with Major because she knows she has these secrets to keep, instead of trying to maintain a relationship and a secret life. It just wasn't clear from the pilot that this dilemma was going to become so important to the show. (To be fair, The Flash has done a better than usual job dealing with the secret life dilemma, too. But it has also given Barry Allen an almost nonexistent social life outside of his work as The Flash, so that the matter of secret-keeping is much more narrowly focused.)
Anyway, it's one of my favorite new shows, and deserves more attention.
Wednesday, January 28, 2015
super super underwear nor any drop to drink
Smallville ran for ten years before ending not long ago. Today we've got Arrow, The Flash, Agents of SHIELD, Agent Carter of SHIELD, Gotham, and Constantine, with Supergirl, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Daredevil, Iron Fist, Powers, and a reboot of Heroes on the way, and God knows what else in development. There's a crazy number of superhero shows on TV right now. Like with the Lord of the Rings movies, the (upcoming) Star Wars sequels, the Spider-Man movies, it's the kind of thing that would've seemed too good to be true if you'd told me about it in the 80s. Unlike most of those things, though, maybe it really is too good to be true -- most of these shows are not very good.
My one concern with this entry is that I don't want this blog to just be a collection of things I don't like, you know? There is plenty on television that is either awful or, at least, Not My Kind of Thing. I don't think it's worth my time to talk about that television, nor your time to read about it.
So why do I feel like I want to write about superhero shows when I think they're largely mediocre? I guess because I love the genre. I guess because I'm invested. And that's a different feeling about mediocrity, a different experience of mediocrity, than the mediocrity of House or Two and a Half Men.
I don't know for sure if comics or television provided my first introduction to superheroes. There were, actually, a lot of superhero shows on TV when I was a kid, if you count the reruns and the cartoons: Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman, Adam West as Batman, The Courtship of Eddie's Father's Bill Bixby in The Incredible Hulk, the original Spider-Man cartoon, the Superfriends and related DC superhero cartoons, and the often-forgotten live-action Spider-Man show with Nicholas Hammond:
I was particularly a fan of Spider-Man and Batman, which I think is as much an effect of the era as of the innate qualities of those characters: there may have been few real classics being produced in superhero TV in the 60s and 70s, but the best of what was made always had Spider-Man or Batman in it. It probably helps that, although Spider-Man has actual super powers and Batman doesn't, they were both street-level heroes who didn't seem out of place fighting gangs and bank robbers (or "supervillains" in the form of bank robbers with outlandish costumes). Superman is a hard sell on television because he's so fucking powerful, how do you challenge him week in and week out, without a movie-level budget?
Comics-wise, I started with hand-me-downs and borrowed comics from older friends, like Jason, who was a few years older than me and had the cabin next to ours up at the lake. Jason had a bunch of DC comics that he'd bring up every summer, including a ton of Superman comics (and Superman Family, Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, etc) with that era's focus on imaginary stories, red kryptonite-induced transformations, and the many other colors of kryptonite (the below list isn't even complete).That Marvel Team-Up issue below is the first Marvel comic I owned. Both these comics highlight some pretty stark differences between comic book superheroes and the TV superheroes at the time. TV superheroes lived in a much, much more normal world than the "real" Marvel or DC universes. In most shows, the protagonist was the only superhero in the world (the cartoons were the exception here), and often there weren't even any supervillains with actual powers - maybe you'd have a mummy now and then, or a commie robot or something. But forget about Spider-Man fighting Dr Octopus, or teaming up with the Invisible Girl.
The Incredible Hulk was one of the most successful of these shows -- one of the few to go more than a season or two -- and it's a pretty good example of how "superheroes" were approached. As everyone knows, the Incredible Hulk was just The Fugitive with a new skin: David Banner ("Bruce" was too gay for TV) was on the run because of havoc caused by his alter ego, The Hulk, and pursuing a cure to his condition, while being pursued in turn by investigative journalist McGee, who is determined to prove the Hulk exists. Like with the Fugitive or the A-Team, this builds some dramatic tension into every episode, because the main character has to stay on the move to stay safe; like those shows, it avoids worldbuilding or significant character development, because every episode the action has moved to a different dot on the blue highways, with a different guest cast and a different dilemma to be solved in an hour.
Until the X-Files popularized the "monster of the week" episode, this was the basic form that adventure shows took, whether their protagonists were superheroes, fugitive surgeons framed for murder, talking cars and their drivers, or an alien and his half-alien son. Like the rest of TV, in the days before VCRs and a post-broadcast market, most shows leaned pretty heavily on a formula, and continuity didn't change much, except occasionally in season premieres (often to tinker with the formula or cast, quickly setting up a new formula rather than an alternative to formula).
The adventure shows disappeared over time. Okay, it's not a genre with clearly defined boundaries, but I think of it as a 60-minute light drama in which every episode finds the protagonist(s) righting a wrong - whether fighting a monster, stopping an assassination, helping a family-owned farm stop the evil corporation from buying it out, whatever - while staying distinct from the police procedural. The 80s version of the genre was as influenced by The Dukes of Hazzard and Wonder Woman as by The Fugitive. I think it's easy to forget just how big this was. Look at 1987-1988:
Sundays: Werewolf and Supercarrier
Mondays: MacGyver
Wednesdays: Highway to Heaven
Fridays: The Highwayman
Saturdays: Once a Hero
That's six shows in an era of three and a half networks (Fox only had programming two nights a week, like the cable channels today), but I'm leaving out the detective shows, which sort of straddled the tonal line between adventure shows and cop shows: Spenser for Hire, Murder She Wrote, Magnum P.I., Sonny Spoon, Jake and the Fatman, J.J. Starbuck, The Law and Harry McGraw, Simon and Simon, Private Eye, and the when-it-was-good-it-was-very-very-good Moonlighting.
Speaking of Moonlighting, Lois and Clark is a pretty great example of what's wrong with superhero TV, insofar as it followed the pattern of reassuring the viewer (and other decision-makers) by making a show that was a light and unchallenging version of a proven success, with a few costumes thrown in. It did give us this, though:
The early superhero TV shows often shot themselves in the foot by reinventing their superhero characters and risking the alienation of comic book fans. TV's Banner isn't exposed to gamma radiation -- traumatized by his inability to prevent his wife dying in a car accident, he studies the phenomenon of people calling on unexpected reserves of strength in crises and experiments on himself, turning himself into the Hulk. Which really makes no more sense than gamma radiation, but no gamma means no Rick Jones (as well as robbing the show of an easy way to introduce supervillains), one of the Marvel Universe's more enduring characters.
Probably the most egregious examples of reinventing the comic book character are Shazam, in which Captain Marvel's origin drops the wizard Shazam and has CM traveling the country in a Winnebago ...
... and even more inexplicably, Hanna Barbera's cartoon version of The Thing, in which the Fantastic Four don't even show up and Benjy Grimm is a teenager who transforms into The Thing with magic rings, an even more substantial change than the Hulk's.
I actually really loved the Thing cartoon as a kid! But it bore almost no resemblance to the comic book.
Thing is, I love the superhero genre. I still read comics, though fewer of them (Captain Marvel, Silver Surfer, and Star-Lord are among my favorites in years). I have a superhero novel in progress, inspired largely by the Marvel comics of the 70s and those Superman imaginary stories I grew up with. The mediocrity of superhero TV shows is more of a nuisance to me than that of police procedurals or Quirky Detectives.
There are two ... axes, I guess, of mediocrity to talk about here. First, most of these shows just aren't very engaging - whatever the flaws or virtues of their take on the superhero-specific elements, they're just not especially well-written or -acted. Second, those superhero-specific elements themselves are often handled in the dullest way possible.
Second point first. Like I said, in most superhero shows, the protagonist is the only super-powered being in the whole damn world. Smallville changed that, but for the most part it stuck to the slightly broader version: the source of the protagonist's powers is the only source of super powers in the whole damn world. I certainly didn't watch all of Smallville, but apart from the occasional guest appearance of Aquaman or whatever, most of the superbeings were either fellow Kryptonians or got their powers from "meteor rock."
You know what was great about the X-Files? It wasn't just about UFOs. It wasn't just about vampires. It was about UFOs and vampires and alien abductions and werewolves and prehistoric mites and cockroach robots and clones and mutant contortionists. Even Buffy the Vampire Slayer didn't limit herself to vampires -- or to the idea that everything supernatural in Sunnydale came from the Hellmouth or shared a common origin with the Slayer.
Interesting worlds are messy and complicated. Somehow the kids who grew up with Superfriends -- with a Kryptonian, Gotham's mystery man, the prince of Atlantis, a space cop with a magic ring, an Amazonian warrior, and Apache Chief fighting robots, aliens, and Solomon Grundy -- grew up and decided that a TV show where more than one thing is different from the real world would just be too confusing.
That's what's GREAT about them. People don't like soap operas DESPITE the evil twins and amnesia and betrayals. Nobody watched the first season of Desperate Housewives thinking, boy, this would be great if not for the blackmail plot and the narration by the ghost of the dead friend with a secret. But so many superhero shows are put together as though the audience is expected to tolerate the superpowers and costume, while mostly being interested in some lukewarm love triangle and a couple of half-baked mysteries.
That brings me back to the first point. The main problem with superhero shows, I think, is one that plagues science fiction shows in general -- speculative fiction shows in general, if you like:
Almost every science fiction show is worse than the non-science fiction show it most closely resembles.
Maybe that's why Battlestar Galactica is so good - it doesn't really resemble any non-sf shows. It's impossible to imagine what the show would be, without its Cylons and spaceships and mythic trappings.
Most superhero shows aren't shows about superheroes so much as they're shows starring superheroes. They could as easily be shows about detectives or fugitive surgeons.
And just like that Marvel brand name undoubtedly was sufficient for the show to be renewed, other superhero shows always seem to be put together as though -- even though the writers avoid the superhero genre's conventions and messiness as much as possible -- the fact that a superhero is present is supposed to be enough to attract our interest. Science fiction shows have been doing that for ages - a few robots or aliens cover up the sub-standard acting or reliance on formula, and the fans gobble it up often enough that it pays off.
Even Agent Carter, which as a miniseries doesn't need to depend on formula plots to kill time, and which is significantly better than Agents of SHIELD, is pretty awful if you gauge it as a period show (someone even coughs into their elbow, for Christ's sake). As a period show, it reads like it's made by people who read the back cover blurbs of a couple books about the period and decided that the most important difference other than the fashion was that since the main character is a woman, sexism needs to be front and center. Not realistic or well-written sexism. Just a bunch of buffoons constantly needling Carter for being a lady. Nevermind that the really insidious fact of the sexism of the period - or sexism now - is that very intelligent, competent, skilled, kind, and gracious men are just as capable of being sexist assholes as the rest are.
If you pay attention to my complaints, you may not be surprised that my favorite superhero show right now is The Flash, who lives in a world that actually has other super-powered beings in it. Time travel even features in the plot! It's a far cry from perfect -- I don't watch every episode, and it's not good enough to bump into the "stuff I watch with Caitlin" priority tier -- but it's a good deal better than Arrow, for instance, which I just can't take seriously despite having given it several tries, or the awful stink of SHIELD. (Gotham started out promising, but is already hamstrung by the problems introduced by its premise -- how does it plan to fill five or six years when it's having this much trouble in its first season?)
The show that gets everything right is Batman: The Brave and the Bold, which happens to be a cartoon. It might be tangential enough to merit its own post except that talking about it in this one gives me an opportunity to focus on the positive.
Airing from 2008 to 2011 on the Cartoon Network and available on DVD and Netflix now, Batman: The Brave and the Bold was the perfect way to do a Batman cartoon without mimicking the Art Deco cartoon of the 90s. Like the Silver Age comic for which it's named, each cartoon features Batman teaming up with another hero -- usually more than one, since the cold open at the beginning is usually a separate adventure. (In fact, the cold opens feature some of the show's most brilliant storytelling, managing to conjure up so much in so little time.) The cold opens sometimes tied in to later main episode storylines -- Equinox and Starro recur as villains in the first two seasons, for instance.
It's a perfect model for how a live-action show should be done, especially something continuity-heavy like the X-Men. Even a Dr Strange show would benefit from dropping us into the tenth year of Stephen's stint as Sorcerer Supreme and revealing his origin over flashbacks in the cold opens of the first season, let's say. Throw Dormammu, Clea and Umar, Baron Mordo, and Nightmare at us all at once. Make references to Strange's former membership in the Defenders, and have the Silver Surfer or the Black Knight show up for help once in a while. We can handle it, I promise.
As an aside, although I decided only to focus on comic book adaptations here rather than original superhero shows like Heroes, there are two British shows of the latter category worth drawing attention to, both of which are available on Hulu: Misfits and No Heroics. Misfits is the more dramatic and goes on for more seasons, though it also gets gradually less engaging as half the cast leaves; it's of the "something happens and suddenly there are superpowers" genre, while No Heroics is a sitcom set in a superhero-filled world.
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