A big problem for TV writers right now is developing characters that have strong motivation. Police procedurals are filled with criminals who do things for ridiculous reasons. For example, I saw an episode of Bones set in a renaissance fair milieu.The plot as such was that a medieval enthusiast with in-depth knowledge of weaponry and combat gave a poorly-made sword from a fantasy movie to a girl he adored (anonymously - he was dressed as the Black Knight of Arthurian lore). She tried to sell the sword, which made him angry, so he killed her with a 16th century torture device. Police procedurals as a genre seem to be jumping the proverbial shark...
But this problem of motivation is not limited to procedurals. Eli Stone is one of the most (unintentionally) absurd TV shows on right now, and that's saying something. On the episode I saw tonight, the Christian parents of a girl killed in college object to their daughter's heart going into the body of an atheist because, get this... they don't want her daughter's heart going to hell. These parents talked about accepting Jesus and being saved, but apparently were Catholic also (I guess all Christians are alike?). At the end of the show, the mother consents to her daughter's heart saving the atheist. She says to Eli: we've heard that you have visions, and you're lucky. For the rest of us, we live in the dark. I choose to believe that our daughter is sending us a message that she would want this lady to have her heart. What a muddled confusion of motives! The mother acted like no Christian I've ever known: Protestant or Catholic. They may act better or worse, but the motive given is not based on anything except some idea in a writer's head. And the final relenting is idiotic. To say that "I choose to believe" is to say that it makes me feel better to make this decision, but I actually believe in nothing.
2 comments:
Thanks for reminding me why we gave up TV for Lent about 13 years ago and haven't gone back.
Well, this is a rant about bad tv, especially a genre that's past its sell-by date like the procedurals.
There's also good tv, which as with any cultural form relatively rare. The crap makes the pearls stand out.
But I have a soft spot for mediocre tv, the kind that Walker Percy liked. His choices were MASH and the Incredible Hulk. I like NCIS and a couple of the sitcoms left on the air...
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