Ridiculous and bad science premise results in someone being gorily murdered, often involving slime and/or blood.
CREDITS roll.
OLIVIA
(stares emotionlessly)
WALTER BISHOP
Something off the wall, either grossly inappropriate or involving food, while examing some grotesque CG creature or corpse.
(The audience laughs and shakes their heads).
PETER BISHOP
(smirks mysteriously)
THE END
And yet I love this show. I want to start a Doctor Walter “Crazy Motherfucker” Bishop fanclub.
Still, the most recent episode had some painfully bad science. The cold is caused by a virus. Viruses are not cells. Come on, Fringe, that’s first-year bio stuff. Don’t embarass me like that again. Or I might just have to download Walter highlight reels instead of actually watching your show.
This weekend, Sarah and I tucked into the first season of the AMC series Mad Men. The concept of the show is in essence a look at the lives of Madison Avenue advertising executives, their office staff, and their families. Oh, and their mistresses. Infidelity is the fuel that ran Madison Avenue, apparently. The show begins in 1960—one the background plots is the election of Kennedy vs. Nixon and the focal agency has to work for Nixon (without being paid). In the first episode, the audience witnesses enough social injustice in the form of sexism and racism to erase all idealistic notions of the time period. It almost crosses the line into parody territory, and perhaps for some it will. I found myself rolling my eyes by the end of the first episode. As the season goes on, they tone this down a little bit (while cranking up the existentialism).
Much of the show’s appeal is the self-righteous indignation I feel when I see African Americans being treated like 3rd class citizens, children being slapped around by the neighbors, or women being commanded by their husbands like servants. I suspect self-righteous indignation for the liberal may be in short supply with our side taking over things for a few years. I recommend picking up the DVD to everyone looking to keep the flames indignation burning so as to not realize that your anger is all that makes you feel alive and fill the hole inside your soul! It’s working great for me so far.
Beneath the obvious “oh my god, they were SO primitive and evil” aspect of the show, I sympathize with the existential dread that much of the cast feels. No one is happy, despite having it all and living the American Dream. The central thesis of this show at least early on is that the American Dream is hollow and meaningless and has nothing to do with our true happiness.
I didn’t really have any interest in the show until I saw it parodied on Saturday Night Live in some of the better sketches they’ve done in the past few years. Despite never having seen the show, and even through the layer of parody, I was intrigued by the premise of the show. For me, it’s the best thing to come out of Saturday Night Live in years.
The ABC series Lost is, quite possibly, the most broadly successful science fiction television show yet. While ratings have been on a decline in this, the fourth season, the season’s premiere pulled in 16.07 million viewers. Now, these are Nielsen numbers, which I consider suspect at best, but it shows that the show is very popular, and almost certainly not just with traditional SFfans (those numbers cannot be accounted for purely by fans). Current episodes have dealt openly with science fiction tropes (which I will not name exactly to avoid spoilers). You could argue about the true classification of the show, but it most certainly falls into science fiction, as well as maybe a couple of other genres.
When the show first started, fans knew something was unusual, but that was a bit subtle. Dozens of people had survived a horrific plane crash, landing on a strange island. Compasses don’t work. There’s a weird radio transmission. And there’s a monster in the jungle that nobody can see.
Still, I suppose, many audience members disinclined to like SF could make the case for the show being in the thriller/mystery genre. And it did have a heavy human, more dramatic element in the form of each episode’s character-centric back story arcs. It wasn’t until late season 2 that things really began to take a turn for the speculative. And even then, it was subtle, just a few elements. But as the show has progressed, it’s become clear that the entire foundation of what the show is about is science fiction (or at least science fantasy).
But as each season has gone on, it has been increasingly impossible for even the most determined to deny that Lost is, at its roots, a science fiction show. You could call the techniques they used to grab their audience bait-and-switch, because the show creators introduced the heavy speculative elements slowly. I’d also call it the frog in a pot of boiling water acclimation method.
My coworker, the Lost fan
An anecdote: I have a coworker who hates science fiction. In his words, he likes “real things.” He despises superhero movies, and pretty much everything a SF fan loves. Early on, the show creators of Lost said in an interview that everything presented on the show had a grounding in real science (something that at this point is highly debatable). Still- my coworker clung to this statement like it was a life preserver. It allowed him to keep watching the show no matter how fantastic things got, because it was still somehow “real.” At this point in the fourth season, he’s pissed off, because he realizes that statement was total bullshit. But he’s still watching, and still hooked.
The reason? A good mystery is compelling no matter what other genre tropes you add to the stew of your story. The characters, after 3 complete seasons, are sympathetic and well-known. All the foundations of a good story are there, to the point that, despite my coworker hating everything there is to hate about science fiction, he is still a huge fan of the show.
This is a good example of how genre is becoming the mainstream. For those fans who would like to see the genre remain distinct and separate, I think this turn of events is going to be a massive disappointment. Reviewing the past events of the show, it almost looks as if the show creators deliberately plotted out their introduction of SF tropes to create the frog in a pot of boiling water effect.
What’s especially fantastic in my mind is that Lost hasn’t given us SF-lite. It slowly introduced the elements, yes, but they are not watered down to be more palatable. We have full-fledged weirdness here. This is a show that Charles Fort would watch and clap his hands with glee.
The potential for new fans
By the time Lost completes its arc, there is going to be a whole new audience primed to accept our stranger ideas. New TV shows will come along to take advantage of this, but maybe, just maybe, SF publishers can lure some of them in too. Frankly, you could do worse than adding even 1% of Lost’s fanbase to your readership. You could do a hell of a lot worse.
I’m sure there are downsides to the mainstreaming of SF tropes. It makes us feel less special and unique, maybe. But as a working creative, I will just have to swallow my pride on that one. With this kind of potential for fans out there, it gives me hope that we could actually make a good living telling genre stories, and not just the ones marketed to an aging, increasingly conservative SF fanbase.
But then, maybe I’m all wrong
But then, the decline in ratings that Lost is suffering right now might be an indicator that the broader audience of Lost has been alienated by the speculative aspects of the show. For the week of May 4, the show didn’t even break the top 20. There may be many reasons why this show is falling in the ratings. And even if it is popular by genre show standards, it pales in comparison to reality shows involving dancing and singing.
Hi! My name is Jeremiah Tolbert, but call me Jeremy. I am a writer, photographer, and web designer currently living in Northern Colorado, seeking either freelance web design work or fulltime employment. Drop me a line if you have any questions, comments, advice, or heckles. I love hearing from new people. If you’re inclined, you can follow me on Twitter, where I share various links and talk about the same things I talk about here, only with fewer characters.
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