Lathany

I'm writing a long article about the problems that Heroes had through the seasons. I feel that its good start was actually a problem in many ways - had it taken a while to get into its stride it wouldn't have felt as disappointing later.

Edited Date: 2010-05-13 08:48 pm (UTC)

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condign.livejournal.com

Sadly, it's on NBC: had it taken a while to get its stride, it would have been canceled in mid-season 1.

This is why I hated the WB/UPN merger into CW: good science fiction or fantasy shows (think Buffy) could survive there for quite some time, and have a chance to get good.

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Although given Heroes stellar start, it could have probably survived with a slightly less stellar start.

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http://users.livejournal.com/_alanna/

A slight side-note, but Chuck's very good - worth a try for geeky comedy. It really hit it's stride in season 2.

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I might take a look. I prefer sci-fi/action stuff to geeky comedy, but I do watch the latter.

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It's a sci-fi/action geeky comedy!

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Can you compare it to anything? I mean, Buffy comes vaguely under that label too - is it anything like that?

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I suppose you could vaguely call it a spy/scifi equivalent of Buffy. If Chuck reminds me of any other character, I suppose it'd be Xander. Adam Baldwin's in it being awesome as usual, so there's your tie to the Whedonverse :)

Chuck's a dropout computer geek working as tech support in the fictional equivalent of PC world. He has a coterie of loser geek friends who work there too. He inadvertently gets a prototype government database of spy secrets downloaded into his head, which for one reason or another, is the only copy. Hence the CIA need to use him as a resource, which triggers Chuck's aspirations to be a spy. Which leads to an unusually large number of espionage missions involving his local area, into which his idiot mates frequently get inadvertently involved in.

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condign.livejournal.com

I've seen Chuck, and I have to say, it leaves me utterly cold. The acting is silly, the premise ridiculous, and makes me think nothing more than, "Wow. Nice to know the same hackneyed plots on Alias aren't on the welfare line." (Then again, maybe it got better after the first three episodes.)

If Chuck edges out Heroes, I have a feeling you'll be disappointed.

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condign.livejournal.com

(My main problem with Chuck: end of episode one, I was wondering why the competent and morally ambiguous bruiser didn't simply solve the problem by killing Chuck.)

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Chuck's renewal has been announced today, so if it is/was a straight fight between the two, Heroes lost.

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I suppose whether or not Chuck will entertain you is based not so much on whether or not you agree with the statement "The acting is silly, the premise ridiculous" - that's a given. The question is whether or not you think it's a bad thing.

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cuthbertcross.livejournal.com

we watch it! Though I'm trying not to read your review/this entry too closely as we are still 3 episodes behind due to business and having the leisure of a hard disc recorder. )

It will be a real shame if it just stops dead. Let's see.

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I don't think the entry is much of a spoiler for the end of season four (although I removed the bit I realised was a spoiler for anyone who hadn't reached season three). So feel free to read it more carefully!

I'm not completely ruling it out, as this is still a rumour. But it sounds depressingly plausible.

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bateleur.livejournal.com

It doesn't just stop dead in that the end of Season Four arguably works fine as an overall ending.

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I am always hugely amused at the notion that US series ought to be given ten more hours to wrap things up. That's more than the cinema cut of Lord Of The Rings. My view of Heroes is that they wanted to wrap Heroes up, they should have used the twenty or thirty hours of it in which nothing much happens.

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I am always hugely amused at the notion that US series ought to be given ten more hours to wrap things up.

That's a half-fair point. Ten more hours would be a half-season and therefore be able to do an "end storyline" rather than a "wrap things up". However, I don't think four hours is too unreasonable given that there's still a good main six - ten characters in it (and a few others that could be mentioned as having closure). OK, LotR has more characters but mostly they act in groups.

My view of Heroes is that they wanted to wrap Heroes up, they should have used the twenty or thirty hours of it in which nothing much happens.

Not an unreasonable view. But, given that they didn't, I'd like a bit of closure to the story.

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Well, I'd argue that the characters in LotR act in a coherent storyline that someone planned out before writing.

I have lost patience with Heroes several times over the last few years, only to have been drawn back in because it's marginally better than stuff like 24, and so few alternatives left within the genre. I'd certainly recommend Chuck over it, even though it's well past its best.

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bateleur.livejournal.com

Well, I'd argue that the characters in LotR act in a coherent storyline that someone planned out before writing.

You'd have to word that as "as though someone planned it out before writing", because in fact JRRT famously just scribbled piles of notes - it was allegedly his wife who mostly compiled the books!

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Well, even if that has to be modified to "Substantially edited into a coherent plotline before being unleashed on an unsuspecting world", the point still holds :)

I spent far too much time watching Heroes feeling "this will become good at some unspecified point in the future" rather than "this is good *now*." Even season one, which was more than occasionally good, could have benefitted from heavy editing.

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they should have used the twenty or thirty hours of it in which nothing much happens.

If they had known then when it would be cancelled, maybe they could have done that. I guess you could hold the writers of TV shows responsible for these kinds of time-wasting and vague endings, but only by blaming them for choosing to write full TV series in the first place, when they could have been writing mini-series, or films, or novels. The idea that you broadcast the last episode of a series *before* deciding whether it's the last series or not gives the writers an impossible quandary: they must "tie things up", and they must "leave things open".

If 10 hours is what Kring thinks it would take, then it's not so much that Heroes should be given another 10 hours, IMO, it's that they should have been canned 10 hours before the end of series 4. But networks don't try to make coherent chronicles, they fill hours of schedule.

I'm watching The Mentalist, and clearly they could wrap the whole thing up at any time with 2-3 episodes notice. Defensive writing against CBS executives?

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Seems to me that the main problem is that the writers want their cake and eat it. They want the narrative form of novels, with the long-term employment possibilities of serial fiction. They know the realities of the situation; whatever you get an order for, that's maybe the last you ever get and you should treat it as such. Write towards a conclusion each series, and find yourself a new plot for next season. How hard is that?

They've got this ludicrous idea in their heads, however, that it's required, or even plausible to write stories where, at the end of 22 episodes, you're only at the end of part one, and just starting to get interesting.

As far as The Mentalist goes, you could wrap it in five minutes. Just have someone finally get tired of his smug face and shoot him. He's completely on borrowed time as it is, on that score.

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Write towards a conclusion each series, and find yourself a new plot for next season. How hard is that?

Well, it's probably not actually difficult, and obviously some series do that. That doesn't mean it's always desirable. It requires you to "resolve" everything every series (or half-series if you're supposed to account also for mid-season canning).

Actually, I was quite pleased that 24 did what you suggest. After 12 or so episodes it was lunchtime, the two main plots had been resolved, the series was plainly unimaginative shit, so I stopped watching and I don't feel I missed anything worthwhile. But I can't realistically expect all writers to plan for mediocrity. I'm glad I never watched Lost past episode 2, but I'm led to believe that people who like that sort of thing find it's the sort of thing they like.

If you're going to have a medium with the potential to tell a 100-hour story (or anyway to include a plot which starts at the beginning and finishes at the end), I don't think it's unreasonable for writers to sometimes try to tell that story. Even if there's a high chance of the audience or the execs getting bored, and turning it into an unfinished story, surely it's worth trying? I'm not a great fan of gigantic, sprawling novels, but I do acknowledge that the trilogy (or longer) exists as a medium and is well-liked. Would Lord of the Rings have been 6 better novels if Tolkien had tried to wrap each one up neatly and start the next one fresh? I mean, without assuming that for Tolkien to do that, he would have needed to be a far better author and would have written better books for that reason.

I guess maybe those TV writers should be doing soap opera, and avoid the economic demands of the series format that way.

Quite aside from high-falutin' ideas about the potential of the medium, though, it's expected that a TV series which will be re-commissioned should end on some kind of teaser, and one which won't, won't. So in that very market-driven sense, what the public asks the writers to do is impossible. If TV networks insist on making the decision once it's too late for the writers to react appropriately, then the execs, not the writers, are guaranteeing failure. I agree with bateleur that the end of Heroes just about stands as an end, but it's not a strong one. Had it been a strong ending, it probably would have been a weak series continuation. Doing both probably is hard.

In the case of The Mentalist, the show ends when Red John is identified and either wins or loses. So each series-finale has an option: that can happen, or it can not happen. If it happens, the show is left open, if it doesn't the show is tied up. It can't do both (although now I've said that, maybe they'll find a way to ruin my theory).

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Doing both probably is hard.

The Wire comes close: the ends of Seasons 1 and 2 could have been a full stop. 3 less so, and I haven't finished 4 yet. Then again, since there are "only" 60 episodes total I'm going to assume without proof that it wasn't subject to the usual network demand than a good series should leave itself open to run as many seasons as demanded. To be honest I'm faintly surprised that anyone in the US but HBO still manages to make drama series worth watching.

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The thing is, I really don't think there *is* such a thing as a 100-hour story. Even the best series are like Harry Potter novels 4-7, bloated with irrelevance and hubris. I don't think there's a single one that couldn't have been done in eight per season.

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True. You can do The Iliad in a movie, and the complete works of Shakespeare in about the same time. And yes, the observation that 90% of everything is crap means that even for good things, 90% of *that* is pointless bloat.

But I don't mean a story that cannot be told in under 100 hours, I mean a story that you do take 100 hours over, with plenty of time for diversion along the way that is entertaining and worthwhile even though it isn't critical. In particular the problem with commissioning a series and never saying whether it's the end or not, is that you cannot have a show which, taken as a whole, develops towards some kind of conclusion. Hence you doom it to stop rather than finishing, because when you do can it, it's unfinished.

Thinking about long-running series of novels: Miss Marple / Bond / etc are totally episodic. Elric has a definite conclusion, but Moorcock has the cunning plan of publishing that and getting it out of the way, then spinning out the middle bits indefinitely. Conan Doyle tried to conclude Sherlock Holmes, and wasn't allowed to. Robert Jordan died. Zelazny returned to Amber for a much weaker second quintet. George RR Martin asymptotically approaches finished as the length of each installement tends to infinity. Rowling may be many bad things, and clearly could have used editing with a pair of shears, but she did at least finish the damn thing.

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Rowling may be many bad things, and clearly could have used editing with a pair of shears, but she did at least finish the damn thing.

Yes, I often give her a lot of credit for that. I'm so grateful I never started on Jordan.

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ao-lai.livejournal.com

I had heard that it was competing with Chuck for renewal a while ago...

...Like Chris V, though, have sort of been letting Heroes slide (I still have the Season 3 DVDs that I haven't watched all the way through yet), wheras Chuck I think is great, so, hmm, well, yes. If only one of them gets to survive...

(Please don't hate me! ^_^;)

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