So, this weekend was a big weekend. An epic weekend. A weekend to end all weekends. Announcements were made, questions asked and answered, celebrations commenced and pictures were taken. Jeffster! performed. Wait, what?

That’s right. This weekend was Comic-Con.

You thought I was going to go somewhere else with that, didn’t you?

Yes, this weekend was the annual San Diego nerd prom, which I did not attend but avidly followed because if nerds know how to do anything, it’s blow up the internet. There were the usual vague Lost spoilers (long-dead characters returning!), an adoring crowd at the Chuck panel run by Alan Sepinwall, and lots of sexy double entendres from Torchwood’s John Barrowman. If at all possible, I am totally going next year.

The Guild: Avatars and actual people

Felicia Day aka Codex - Actress, girl gamer, Guild writer

Inspired by Comic-Con, though, I spent this weekend watching a show I’ve heard about for a long time but never got around to watching – Felicia Day’s internet webisode minishow The Guild. The show is about a gaming guild, The Knights of Good, whose internet relationships begin to bleed into their physical lives. Each episode is only about five minutes long, and crammed full of World of Warcraft references, deeply awkward comedy, and low budget video. Xbox sponsored The Guild’s second season, so the budget and the video quality dramatically improve, but not so much that it looks like an episode of 24. Other than high def quality and the sudden presence of PCs rather than Macs, The Guild seems to have remained its nerdy, in-joking, socially inept self.

I don’t play World of Warcraft, so a significant chunk of my viewing experience was the persistent knowledge that I was incapable of appreciating what were probably very funny jokes. Some of it’s not too difficult to make out – when The Guild manages to take down one of their members’ mother in the season one finale (“Boss Fight”), Felicia Day’s character Codex gets stuck with the now-homeless Guildie. “Worst. Loot. Ever,” she complains to her webcam. But many of the jokes require a vocabulary that takes hundreds of hours of gaming, or at least some determined googling, to grasp. QQ! Tank’d! Let’s make the pull, DPS, nasty crit, aggro, I need to be buffed, grinding, etc. etc.

Guild leader Vork - I also make this face when the internet goes down

What’s impressive about The Guild is that even though the specific references don’t always land for me, it’s still hilarious. Much more than a show about a particular game, The Guild depicts collapsing boundaries between a virtual life and a life in the real world. The problem of what happens when relationships inside an online community completely overtake the physical world is equally applicable to any number of all-encompassing virtual groups, and the jokes about addiction, social ineptitude, confused value systems, and stealing WiFi are aimed at a much broader audience. Perhaps my favorite moment is when the game’s servers go down, and the Guild’s leader Vork yells, “It’s like phantom limb pain!”

One question is definitely up for debate – is it fair to call The Guild television? As a video series built for the internet, about the internet (although you can buy it on DVD and download it on Xbox Live), labeling The Guild as “television” seems to miss the point. It’s certainly not a movie, and it is episodic, which I would argue as one of the important defining TV characteristics, but is it too short? Does its original medium make it a significantly different creature than Law and Order or The Simpsons? Or is this just television from a new source?

No, seriously, I’m not sure. Take a look for yourself:

Watch the Guild

It’s really too bad that my first reality TV post had to be about such a heinous, painful, depressing show as Toddlers and Tiaras. Long ago, when I first began transforming into the TV evangelist that I am today, I recall getting into a huge debate with my mother about reality television. Her line then (a belief I’m sure she still holds today), is that reality shows are among the lowest forms of entertainment imaginable, catering to our basest emotions and thriving off our inner voyeurs. Not only are they bad, I believe her argument went, they are bad for us, providing a pedestal for the nadir of humanity and celebrating boorish banality. A slightly younger and significantly more contrarian version of myself took the opposite perspective, and attempted to tout America’s Next Top Model as my generation’s Middlemarch. As I recall, this conversation took place in a family restaurant with gingham tablecloths. My boyfriend was with us, and he spent most of the meal ducking behind napkin holders.

Obviously, I was incapable of swaying her opinion. In retrospect, my choice of reality show was probably not sound, and so the entire force of my argument was required merely to shore up the easily apparent defaults in my chosen program, leaving me incapable of winning hearts and minds. It was, in other words, not unlike recent American foreign policy. Except, you know, about reality shows.

In any case, when I posted yesterday about Toddlers and Tiaras, a little part of me said to myself “See? Your mother was right. They are uniformly despicable programs.” And I was sad about that, because let’s be honest – two paragraphs ago when I described myself as significantly less contrarian now? That was mostly exaggeration. Despite what I wrote yesterday, I refuse to believe that all reality shows are crude, base or otherwise amoral portrayals of the human condition, and this time I have a much better example to prove otherwise.

All summer, I’ve been watching MTV’s new series 16 and Pregnant. Each episode follows a different teenage girl as she copes with her pregnancy, her boyfriend, her family, graduating from high school, and trying to raise her baby, and it is almost inevitably heartbreaking. These young women struggle with loser boyfriends who have no ability to sympathize much less help, they weep as they try to feed a baby while doing homework, and they have epic showdowns with their parents about the future. I think the show was intended to be a “scare ‘em straight” type of program, and although that does sometimes come across, the primary message seems to be “dump your loser boyfriend.”

Except for the last episode. The last episode out of the six features a girl named Catelynn and her boyfriend Tyler, who decide to give their daughter up for adoption. Catelynn and Tyler’s (alcoholic, transient) parents are both against this decision, and Catelynn’s mother even goes so far as to put a frilly bassinette in her daughter’s bedroom, but both teenagers hold their own and insist on giving their daughter a better life than they have. The episode essentially follows the plot of Juno, as Catelynn and Tyler pick out and meet with an adoptive family and struggle with their decision. It’s like Juno, except Tyler is incredibly involved in the process, and the couple who adopt their daughter is stable, and there’s no snappy dialogue to temper the pain of giving birth and giving the baby away. Catelynn’s mother refuses to sign off on the adoption, so Catelynn and Tyler have to trudge through the hospital parking lot and hand off their daughter outside of hospital grounds, a detail legally required by the state. These two teenagers stand on the sidewalk and weep as the attractive, stable, older couple who desperately want a child pack the baby into a car seat and drive away.

This is so far from the nadir of humanity, it’s almost unbearably painful to watch. And more importantly (to my pseudo-battle against my mother’s argument), the walloping impact comes directly from its reality show format. It is so powerful because it’s unscripted, because the emotions are genuine, and because these teenagers signed up to be filmed in order to share their experience with other kids who have the same dilemma. Juno was an entertaining film, but it has nothing on 16 and Pregnant. So maybe I’m still not able to justify The Hills as anything other than a surreal para-reality experience, and maybe Jon and Kate + 8 is exploitative and appalling, but I have not given up on reality television. Maybe one day I can convince my mom.

Two new science fiction programs premiered last week – the BBC’s absolutely incredible miniseries Torchwood: Children of the Earth, and SiiiiiighFy’s new hopeful network-builder, Warehouse 13. It was a big week for science fiction television, but the coincidence of their simultaneous releases draws attention to the surprising parallels between the shows. BBC’s Torchwood has already run for two seasons, an uneven spinoff of the British national television treasure that is Doctor Who, and this miniseries extends and thoughtfully develops the show’s original premise. In a Doctor Who universe, extra terrestrial contact with earth has been occurring for centuries, and Torchwood is a secret group of scrappy in-the-know conspiracy nuts with a mission to protect earth from aliens (and often, vice versa). Under the noses of regular folks, Torchwood contains, destroys or befriends any non-human Earth dwellers, allowing us all to go on with our incurious quotidian lives. Over on Warehouse 13, two misfit FBI agents get reassigned to an enormous secret bunker in South Dakota, a well-hidden vault for all things alien, mystical, superhuman, or just unexplained. After initially grumbling about their unusual job descriptions, Pete and Myka get down to the business of tracking down weird, magical stuff so that good hardworking Americans don’t have to expand their worldviews. Fear not, citizens! Avert your eyes from the strange, eerily seductive older woman with that fetching comb in her hair, she’s just being possessed by the spirit of Lucrezia Borgia.

Strange possessed hair accessory, Warehouse 13

It’s not a terribly original premise (see most memorably, X-Files, Men in Black, also The Matrix, The Middleman, etc. etc.), but what makes these two shows so interesting in juxtaposition is their perspective on who watches these valiant, insightful, open-minded watchmen. On Warehouse 13, Pete and Myka may have left their ladder-climbing FBI careers, but they’re still important members of a federal system. Although dismayed by the new assignment, they are persuaded to trek out to South Dakota because it’s a “matter of national security.” Your friendly neighborhood weird-things experts, Pete and Myka’s job is to help the government protect us from stuff we won’t be able to cope with. The first two seasons of Torchwood also used a lot of that “we worry so you don’t have to” rhetoric, but Children of the Earth takes a turn toward the paranoid (and certainly more interesting). When children across the world start speaking in unison, Torchwood would love nothing more than to jump into action, but other factions within the British government label them a threat and order them assassinated. Doctor Who often strides into official buildings, reassuring everyone that he’ll save the day, but the members of Torchwood spend this miniseries fleeing capable Black-Ops assassins intent on their deaths.

Torchwood headquarters, the government is watching

Science fiction has always given us access to explore fears about the unknown, and has often famously been an opportunity to create allegories of our more familiar, less frighteningly authoritarian governmental overlords. 1984 and Brave New World are classic warnings against human complacency, cloaked in premises that feel fictional enough to still be enjoyable. But like Eureka, both Warehouse 13 and Torchwood: Children of the Earth capitalize on the coexistence of our known world with a cooler, weirder parallel reality, which makes the reassuring competency of Pete and Myka extra-cozy and the possibility of chilling governmental mercilessness and self-interest way more scary. Of the two, Torchwood is undoubtedly the better, more thoughtful, and more gripping television experience, and I think it’s largely because of the show’s willingness to disassociate its characters from any feel-good national interest. They didn’t get a shiny new popular President across the pond, and it’s not hard for them to believe that a government can turn against its people while whistling a happy tune. Warehouse 13, on the other hand, begins its pilot episode with Pete and Myka protecting an unseen President from what turns out to be a blood-activated killer mask. Guess which show makes for stronger, more intelligent television.

I’ve been watching a lot of Eureka lately. It’s coming back to the new SyFy¹ next week, which I’m excited about, but it really came to my attention as a show to think about when it became a topic of conversation among some sciencey people as a show they really like. I was a little surprised at its popularity, because it always seemed to me like one of those shows where the fiction overtakes the bounds of scientific plausibility (something that doesn’t really bother me, but is roundly disdained by others in my household). The more I watch, though, the more it seems like an important example of the possibility of a non-mediocre middle ground.

Eureka’s premise is that a charming, common sense, everyman, All-American guy named Jack Carter gets assigned to be the sheriff of Eureka, a top secret town full of geniuses. Most of the town is employed by Global Dynamics, a hidden facility sanctioned by the government and designed to create world changing scientific advances. Sheriff Carter’s job is to wade through the daily catastrophes associated with the creation of artificially intelligent military drones, satellites that beam aggression from space, devices that erase memory, etc. etc., while also administering common sense justice against those who use their geniusy powers for selfish purposes. He may not be able to spell corporeal, but he sure can sniff out a bad guy.

Mishap at the Eureka Dog Show

This premise allows Eureka to have its science fiction both ways – it reveres its genius townspeople, it delights in its super geeky setting, but the viewer’s experience of the scifi wackiness is always mediated by Sheriff Carter’s everyman perspective. The space that gets carved out between Carter and everyone else defines the show’s scifi-meets-real-life appeal: Carter lives in an omniscient smart house named Sarah who can anticipate his every need, but who nevertheless gets pissed off when he’s late for dinner. The town hot spot, Café Diem, lets you order anything you can possibly think of and prepares it out of its fission-run, warehouse-sized freezer, but Carter really just wants a burger. Science fair day at the Tesla School for Advanced Learning includes one entry that promises to be the next major development in medical digital imaging, but the school is still ruled by a coterie of gorgeous evil genius girls who mercilessly mock Carter’s daughter Zoë. Eureka lets the viewer imagine awesome scientific advances in the context of recognizable real life, while refusing to condescend either to its slightly stupid main character or its non-genius audience.

The middle ground here comes primarily out of the show’s combination of Carter’s police procedural street smarts and the scifi genre invisible man explodiness, but the impressive resistance to mediocrity comes largely out of its sheer quirkiness. The tone is set by the show’s opening credits, a ridiculously catchy cheerful whistling melody punctuated by odd minor intervals and a piano/washboard backup. That homespun whistle calls back to the Andy Griffith Show backbone that is built into Eureka, but those unexpected intervals cannily inform you that Carter’s Main St. is a different kind of place than Andy’s. Outside of the really masterful main credits, Eureka indulges in a familiar, comforting silliness – lots of covered-in-goo gags, geeky call outs to Doctor Who and Star Wars, Carter’s house is actually a woman jokes, and the unending, ever satisfying encounters between Carter and the scientists he tries to police.² The silliness, though, rarely falls from pleasurable familiarity into boring predictability. New monsters of the week, inventive solutions to mundane problems (your clothes keep cleaning themselves after you take them to the dry cleaners!), and the occasional ring of emotional sincerity prevent the premise from exhausting itself.

Eureka Main Street

Eureka’s writing, while fun, never really elevates it beyond its genre fiction format, and it certainly does not challenge the audience to examine their own lives or confront the existential futility of modern institutions or require them to follow seventeen interwoven plotlines. Still, its pleasant veneer of glossy entertainment acts less as a shell that disguises an empty core and more like a stylistic safety bubble. Inside the bubble, you can forget the implausibility of shared dreaming and instead snicker when the whole town experiences Sheriff Carter’s classic forgot-to-wear-clothes-to-work nightmare. Buried safely within the slick layer of quirk, you’re encouraged to set aside your fake science alert radar and resign yourself to comfortable, imaginative fictional pleasure. Eureka doesn’t take itself too seriously, but its premise and tone do offer some deeper insights. It is an amiable, friendly show, ultimately optimistic about science, the future, and human nature, and full of enough style and imagination to guard against blandness. It lauds common sense without dissing nerdiness, it values loving human relationships without devolving into sappiness (okay, it’s a little sappy), and even as it laughs at itself, it does so without undermining its own project.

All of which is not to say that Eureka is perfect – it certainly isn’t. Some monsters of the week fail to create an appropriate amount of panic, and the origin of any given problem is pretty repetitive (“You say there’s a problem with the flow of time? Who at Global Dynamics is working on a project about time? Lots of space debris headed our way? Say, isn’t someone at Global Dynamics working on a space debris thingy?”). And then there’s the issue of Degree for Men Absolute Protection, which… is a topic for another day. Still, at its best moments, Eureka allows the audience to imagine a future of scientific advances like clean water and air, vaccines for all diseases, and the end of drought and hunger, but it’s difficult to appreciate them from a large-scale perspective. Instead, we experience this edenic future within a familiar, American small town, full of self-cleaning clothes, cars that drive themselves, and houses that have dinner ready when you come home.

¹Yeah, that stupid rebranding is a whole different blog post.

²Carter, to evil scientist: “I’m on to you. I know you have a device that can create a worm hole, or uh, bend time, or make you invisible – a wormholing, timebending, invisibling device that…shields you from the mind.”

Pause.

Other scientist: “Yes. He said invisibling.”