I’ve just seen what is possibly the most ridiculous premise for a television show, ever.
It has long been a fact of life in my house that, if we like a show, it gets canceled. If a show is sharp and well-written, it will probably get the mid-season axe (Yes, shows like “Firefly,” and yes, I am a Browncoat, but let’s not even go there.)
Well-written shows are thin on the ground these days. Ironically, broadcast television and the major networks—once the movers and shakers of primetime—are sinking to new and totally unimpressive lows, scything back scripted shows like Death himself, while pumping the pabulum of competition and so-called “reality” shows into our living rooms like cut-rate meth. Basic cable is the new frontier, and it’s doing some great work, but examples are few and far between.
As a consumer of television fare, I’m a tough market, but I am willing to suspend my disbelief—a lot—if you give me a good plot, some good writing, and some good acting to carry me along. Shows like “Awake” and “Journeyman” (both defunct) came with the sort of setup that required a healthy suspension of disbelief, but they both paid great dividends in the writing and the intricate plots. The writers for these shows put some serious effort into building a basis for the shows, and as incredible and hard-to-believe as the premises were, they had a logic that was integral to the worlds they inhabited. They made sense, and you didn’t have to dump a trainload of fundamental truths in order to go along with them.
Every story, every novel, no matter how bizarre the setting, must have an internal logic. If it doesn’t make sense, we won’t buy it. You can have wizards and dragons and disc-shaped planets and time travel, you can break every rule of physics and change the course of history, but if you don’t explain it or worse, if you can’t explain it, your reader/viewer will be lost to you. If you don’t respect the reader enough to craft a believable plot, you just don’t respect the reader.
This weekend, while watching the Olympics, it was impossible to avoid the ad blitz for the new NBC show, “Revolution.” The JJ Abrams nametag was intriguing, as was Jon Favreau’s direction for the pilot, and post-apocalyptic setting (thankfully sans zombies) looked okay. But what was the premise? That suddenly all the electricity stopped working? No, seriously, what’s the premise?
I did a search to find out exactly what I was missing. I found that the show was set fifteen years after
…an unknown phenomenon permanently disabled all advanced technology on the planet, ranging from computers and electronics to car engines and jet turbines and batteries.
Oh my.
So, NBC has postulated a phenomenon that was somehow smart enough to know what it was going to disable (Batteries? Really?) I don’t know about you, but an old car engine isn’t “advanced technology.” The internal combustion engine is, essentially, just like, fire, you know? And not only is it smart enough to know what it’s going to disable, it’s completely undetectable, and the entire world is unable to figure out what it is or where it came from or how it did it. This big thing happens, and that’s it. Nothing else happens afterward; no alien invasion, no nano-technological Brownian machines ravage the world, no super-criminal demands a ransom. Nothing. So, this “lights out” moment is totally natural, totally unknown, and totally arbitrary.
But, it’ll probably be a hit because it’s got pretty people swinging swords.
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Ages ago, when the crust was cooling and TV was funny, there was an episode of M*A*S*H where Hawkeye was looking through the files for the map to the minefield and Radar says it’s right here. Under “B”…for “Boom.”
Ever have one of those dreams that is has a really great storyline? I don’t mean a cool (but wacko) storyline where you turn into a dolphin and swim to the Peloponnese where you meet Marisa Tomei and—damn, I love that dream…
Before I started to write, I studied music. Classical music, ancient music, and modern; in orchestras (symphonic, chamber, and pit), in bands (marching, symphonic, jazz, and swing), and in trios, quartets, and quintets; as a student, as an amateur, and as a professional; as a violinist, a violist, on the tuba (Sousaphone and miraphone), with bass guitar, on percussion, and as a conductor: I did it all. For the first three decades of my life, music was my sole creative outlet.
Are there “rules” for genre fiction?
Kurt R.A. Giambastiani 