Television writers should not be held to a lower standard than film or prose writers. Television is a different form, with different needs, but it’s just as viable an art form as anything else. Yet I keep seeing derivative, mediocre television shows being fawned over like they’re something special. The easy, elitist answer is that the people who watch a lot of television are not the same people who read books and watch good movies, but I don’t think that’s the whole story.
Take, for example, this year’s new critical darling, Pushing Daisies. It’s written by Bryan Fuller, who continually gets referred to as things like “brilliant” and “big-brained” by television critics. The concepts for his shows always sound great. Dead Like Me, a show he created for Showtime, followed a recently deceased girl who is brought back to become a Reaper, collecting the souls of the dead and sending them on to the afterlife. Or Wonderfalls, about a girl who worked in a small town knick-knack shop who discovers that the knick-knacks talk to her and tell her how to help people. As for Pushing Daisies, it follows a pie-maker who has the strange ability to bring back the dead for one minute, who uses that ability to solve their murders and collect their rewards.
All premises with promise. But, with the exception of Wonderfalls, which I didn’t see and can’t comment on, his premises prove to be all surface and no meat. Dead Like Me’s mythology was barely there, giving us soul reapers who need to be present at the moment of someone’s death to properly send them on. If they didn’t perform their duty, Bad Things would happen. Yet, they were blessed with no special powers, often having to sneak into places to get to the bodies. Great, except that if it’s that hard to get to the body, how are there not more instances of people not getting reaped, and Bad Things happening as a result.
Pushing Daisies isn’t much better. The main character’s power brings the dead back with a touch. If they stay alive for more than a minute, someone else dies in their place. That’s cool, right? Well…only sort of, because if he touches the person again, they immediately die again, this time forever. So the price for someone staying alive is someone else dying, right? But even if this other person dies, the main character still can’t ever touch the person he saved, because they’ll go back to being dead. So where’s the temptation that should come with a setup like this? The tension should be that either you get to have the person back and kill someone else, or you touch them again within a minute and they go back to being dead. That’s all the plot you need.
But, wait, Bryan, your premise requires a stupid romance plot, where the main character brings back his childhood love only to never be able to touch her, despite their mutual attraction. Yawn + gag. If you had ever read a single bit of actual mythology, you might be able to construct a premise that properly pulls on the parts of us that respond to this stuff. And do you know how I know you don’t read the stuff you’re trying to ape? Because, when the Love Interest wakes up, your idiotic narration tells us that “only Sleeping Beauty could know how she felt.” Really? Because I seem to remember Snow White was also knocked out and brought back by her prince. Oh, I’m sorry, you wanted to show how smart you were. Sorry, I’m being rude.
I don’t mean to be so angry about this, but I’m sick of seeing good writing from novels and films being recycled onto television series’ where they’re hailed as original and groundbreaking. They’re neither. Sure, this kind of improper praise happens in other mediums, but it happens constantly on television. Dead Like Me was Neil Gaiman without the heart, metaphysical curiosity or credibility on the subject. Pushing Daisies is the same, only it steals Tim Burton’s visual style, too. It’s the same with Heroes (a show for which Fuller wrote), which is a moronic retread of Watchmen, Rising Stars and X-Men, which are all borderline retreads of other stuff anyway. The works these people are copying delved into their subjects, using their fantastical premises to ask deep questions about humanity. On one of Fuller’s shows, you’re lucky if someone spends one line of dialog asking why they got their powers and what they mean.
Can we stop heaping praise on this stuff? Television could be used to tell intelligent, serialized stories if we stopped letting hack versions of more accomplished writers copy things so poorly. You want to copy Neil Gaimain? Fine. Actually, please, go for it. Just do it right. Do it and stop pretending that you’re breaking ground. It’s ok to let another writer break ground while you take their innovation and tell a more perfected, polished story with its concepts.
It’s writers like Fuller who annoy me. I can’t say with any certainty what kind of person he is, so I can only judge him from his writing, and his writing carries an air of pretentious ego that is undeserved for merely producing faded copies of better works. Meanwhile, on the CW, Reaper, is skipping forward, taking an overdone premise and making it fun. It also devotes just a little bit of time to muse on what the implications of its premise are.
If the only reason you came up with a story where someone’s touch resurrects then kills someone was so that your main character can pine for a girl he can no longer touch, you’re wasting everyone’s time. We’ve seen unrequited romantic tales many, many times before. Bring something new to the table. Or at least stop pretending you’re bringing something new to the table.
And television critics? Please, go read a book, see a film, then go back to your job and start demanding your medium’s creators be a little more original when they’re ripping everyone else off.
