So we’re watching Chuck last night, and the going gets pretty rough. The plot holes are so enormous, you could set up camp and build a small colony of frontierspeople inside of them, except they are barren wastelands of plot uninhabitable by even the heartiest frontiersperson. I’m feeling pretty nervous about it because I know it’s a very thin line, and when he picks up the iPhone and spends the rest of the episode reading it rather than watching the TV, I know what’ll be coming once the episode ends – my husband is no longer interested in Chuck. You are a quitter, I tell him, a narrative deserter, and just because a show has gotten bad (as, oh boy, Chuck certainly has recently), it does not mean it can’t get better. His counter argument is that once most shows get bad, they do not come back, and there’s no use waiting around on the barest hope of a brighter future to come.

There are obviously examples of shows that get bad and for whatever reason, do not recover. We all know the tragic stories, the sad shambling corpses of formerly entertaining programs lingering on long past their prime like miserable shark-jumping zombies. Gilmore Girls season seven. Prison Break, Heroes, Alias, Entourage. There are a number of reasons things can go wrong, including changes in the creative staff, pressure from networks, a resistance to imaginative or risky storytelling, a concept that’s meant to be small saddled with the burden of far too much time (oh, Prison Break, you poor bastard). But I would argue that some shows can and do get better, even in the face of some dismally low points.

Friday Night Lights – This is obviously the premiere example of how rough things can get on a show and still come back for an amazing third and fourth season. It’s also a good example of how quickly terrible subplots can completely derail the rest of a show (see also: the Coma Baby plot of Veronica Mars season two). The Landry/Tyra murder plot is so, so awful and was so thoroughly panned as soon as it happened, FNL spent much of the rest of the season trying to get through that damn subplot as quickly as possible and then force everyone involved to forget it ever happened. Not only did the show manage to exit out of that dark hole of implausible violence as gracefully as one could imagine, the show has since had the excellent judgment to avoid anything similarly out of character.

Battlestar Galactica – Sure, sure, it’s great when you can get a science fiction show to speak to topical issues of morality and terrorism in a way that forces people to talk about the intellectual potential of pulp genres. But for the most part, Battlestar’s New Caprica episodes were just treading water until the characters could get back into space (and back into shape, in the infamous case of Tubby Apollo). Even worse, although the explicit references to insurgency, colonialism and prisoners of war brought the show attention for being so politically relevant, it was some of Battlestar’s most heavy-handed thematic work. Those New Caprica episodes were about as subtle as poking out an eye (whoops, sorry Colonel Tigh), but once the show got back into space and Lee Adama lost all that weight, things were back on track.

The West Wing – This one is a complicated example, but worth thinking through. The show suffered one of the worst, most irrevocable changes a show can experience – the departure of its idiosyncratic, driving creative force – and that kind of departure is almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s a change any fervent fan will declare to be the End of the World, and when a show then immediately proves to be much worse than it used to be, it’s easy to write off the show entirely. I understand the argument, and I also believe that post-Sorkin West Wing never reached the same heights as it did in the Sorkin years, but I also think season seven of that show was a vast improvement. It could never go back to being a Sorkin show, but it did grow into its new identity as the Santos-Vinick race overtook the final Bartlet years. It would never be as fizzy or fascinatingly idealistic as the first few seasons, but it was still miles better than the dark days of Leo’s heart attack and the overt Macbeth references, and it was entertaining television.

Dollhouse – A different kind of improvement narrative from the previous examples, but one that probably happens more frequently. Shows begin, and they’re bad. Gradually, with practice and hindsight and feedback, they get better, and the change can be so drastic that the show is nearly unrecognizable. Dollhouse falls in this category, though like so many shows, the change came too late. I’d also list Cougar Town here, as well as Parks and Recreation, Community, Fringe, Sons of Anarchy, and of course, the troublesome Chuck.

I’m not trying to argue that Chuck may not be in trouble – from what I’ve seen so far this season, things look dubious. But the beauty of television’s episodic structure is that new beginnings and fresh starts happen all the time, and no matter how serialized or intricate a show may be, the very concept of an episode promises that things can change. It’s a whole new show every week, with different writers and directors, different guest stars and returning characters, new plots and character arcs. It seems to me this is a reason fans hold onto television shows even after they’re long dead (oh Smallville, you keep on keepin’ on), because the distinct separation of each piece of narrative means it’s easier to believe that the start of the next episode is also the start of a different, better version of the same show you’ve been watching for so long.

I don’t want to chide my husband if he doesn’t want to watch Chuck any more. Maybe it won’t get better, and he’ll have saved all of that time for Boardwalk Empire or The Walking Dead or (one day, because he loves me) Veronica Mars. But I do want to explain why I’ll keep watching, and why that choice makes sense to me.

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.

read more…

This weekend, Syfy premiered Caprica, their new spinoff/prequel to (the incredible, fascinating, philosophical, mythological, much-missed) Battlestar Galactica. While Battlestar was a space opera, focusing on the last remnants of humanity and their search for a new home, Caprica rewinds several decades in the past, a time before Cylons were independently intelligent and looked like blonde Canadian super models.

Proto Cylons on Caprica

As with most spinoffs, Caprica starts off burdened by its predecessor, and it’s difficult to separate the experience of this first episode from its resonances with what we already know about the Battlestar universe. Visual and verbal cues constantly recall the earlier show. The robots that guard buildings have scanning red eyes, characters swear by shouting “Gods!” and “frak,” and we even get a very young William Adama, tying us to the story’s known future. Also like Battlestar, Caprica instantly tackles contemporary problems, especially focusing on terrorism, religious extremism, and virtual worlds.

It’s a double-edged sword. Every adaptation must cope with its original, bringing something new without completely erasing whatever was attractive enough to warrant an adaptation in the first place. Sequels and prequels have it a little easier – they can assume the original’s thematic and atmospheric content without needing to tell the same story, which gives the writers room for more experimentation and development. Still, the pleasure and frustration of returning to a fiction that is both familiar and new is as problematic for Caprica as it is any adaptation.

Urban settings - Caprica City

Someone grunts “frak” under his breath and you thrill with recognition, but even the basic move from militaristic space ships to planet-based, urban settings changes the whole tone. I’m hoping this will shift a little as the series develops out of this first episode, but the fact that many of the main characters are teenagers is surprisingly disorienting. It’s also an essentially different type of story – where Battlestar started from a very science fiction, distant-future foundation and then become something much more recognizable, Caprica begins in a place very close to our reality. Virtual worlds and artificial intelligences are developing but nascent technologies. (Kids these days, they get into all sorts of crazy technology.) Religion and race are powerful political entities, but they get shushed out of polite conversation.

Baby William Adama - you've gotta wonder what will happen to make him look like Edward James Olmos

Part of what made Battlestar Galactica so remarkable is that it was an adaptation itself, and it was forced to take on the cornball, pulp science fiction of its original. Battlestar dealt with the silliness head on by reinterpreting the premise with deep seriousness and completely rethinking the show’s themes, storylines, and dramatic possibilities. I certainly want Caprica to succeed, but it has yet to fully articulate itself outside the shadow of its original, and its ratings indicate its appeal as a prequel isn’t an obvious sell. If it’s going to work, Caprica needs to have moments where the audience forgets it’s watching a prequel to Battlestar and accepts it as a show for its own sake. I really want this show to work, but so far all I see is the impending robot apocalypse. C’mon, Caprica. Make me forget.