The facts were these:
Back in 2002, Bryan Fuller created a lovely little show called Dead Like Me. It was about death - about being dead and not being dead and, among other things, how that can be one of the best ways to understand this life we lead. It was a really lovely show, darkly witty, whimsical without being zany, characterful without being dreary. It ran for two series and then got canned.
In 2008, Bryan Fuller created a lovely little show called Pushing Daisies. It was about death, about grief and mourning, and how we can die while being alive because of secrets and promises we make in our head. It was not so much dark as blindingly colourful and luridly theatrical, thanks to Barry Sonnenfeld bringing over the same high-colour imagery he used in the Tick. And it wasn't so much whimsical as zany and gleefully so, and it could get away with it because it was light-hearted in every possible sense. That is to say, you can get away with a few plot holes if you work hard to create a sense of wonderment and spiritual levity.
Which is to say, Pushing Daisies is the kind of show that makes you believe the world is a fine place, and worth fighting for.
And that's not easy. It's a far-too-widely believed myth that sentiment and happiness are easy to create, but that's not true. They're lazier to create because you can rely more readily on cliche and on the audience's willingness to follow you to a happy ending. You can easily pretend the world is a better place, in general or because of the puppies, but to actually convince people is another matter.
I suppose I'm biased. I like television. It's my medium of choice to find meaning and happiness in the world. And I love mystery shows, particularly ones that are playful with genre tropes and don't take themselves too seriously, like the gorgeous Monk. And have the good sense to have a murderer-of-the-week every week, like the fantastic Monk. Boy, that was a good show. It wasn't a brainburner but it was gentle and crafted with love - for its audience and its characters. And real affection for characters, as opposed to just assuming you'll like them because they're gorgeous or witty or have mad skills, is terrifyingly absent from most writing these days.
Bryan also loves his characters in Pushing Daisies, and he loves their world. Unlike Monk, there is an evolving storyline centering around the hero Ned's magical ability to bring back the dead. He can do it for a minute, then touch them again to put them back. Any longer and something else has to die. The show then follows the ins-and-outs of such a gift (kind of like Buffy followed the highs and lows of being a Slayer) while never forgetting to have wacky mysteries for PI Emerson Cod to solve.
But really it's not just being a good murder-of-the-week show that makes Daisies so good. It's that it has a truly fundamental understanding of style. Style that is imbedded in every inch of the show. Every character has their own colour (not unusual, see Scrubs for another example that does that well) and also their own musical theme and design motifs. And this goes for minor characters as well, each infused with a musical and visual presence and of course delivered with very strong performances, always riding just on the edge of melodrama. The writers too, know how to ride the edge of formulaic but always keep their wheels on the edge of familiar, telegraphed structure, which is a different thing altogether. Every episode for example, is topped with a flashback to the childhood of one of the major characters. Every episode plays with themes, motifs and metaphors both large and small, mirroring subtlety (again, like in Buffy) the emotional drama of the characters in the narrative drama of the mystery. Like a perfectly produced stage performance everyone finds their marks, their themes, and their astonishing visual style, and lives it to the full, so that even if that role is just to be an obvious original suspect who will certainly be killed in Act Two, you see that expressed to its utmost. And like a classic 1930's serial, there's a narrator who knows more than the characters, and loves to tease you on.
And sometimes, if you're really lucky, they let Kristin Chenoweth sing.
Let's be clear: the four leads are powerhouses. Lee Pace sells nervous Ned without making him emo, Anne Friel keeps the soft and cuddly Chuck inches away from coddling and Chi McBride truly understands how to live large without being cliche and as a result may be the coolest private eye since Shaft. But then there's Kristin, as Olive Snook. Chenoweth was absolutely the best thing about the last two seasons of the West Wing, matching an old hand like John Spencer moment for moment, almost spinning herself off into her own little universe of spin-off, the Leo and Annabelle show. She does it agian in Daisies, with every moment she's on screen being pure delight and telling its own little story. Without her to add the zip, the story of lonely Ned and his extremely sappy alive-again childhood sweetheart would be as cloying as it sounds. With Olive - with THE Olive, dropped into the martini of television - it works. Yes, it's that kind of show - Olive is the Olive.
Of course, it might not have worked if said Olive hadn't been the amazing, the wonderful, the exquisite Kristin Chenoweth. But it was, and it did.
And then it lasted two excellent seasons and got canned.
In 2009, Fuller went back to try and tie up some of the loose ends and continue playing with the lovely characters he made in Dead Like Me. We can only pray that, in six years time, he does the same with Daisies. Until then, go and rent or buy this one post-haste.
And Kristin?
Marry me.
Monday, August 2, 2010
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Moon
Note: here be spoilers, and you really don't want to be spoiled on this one.
Moon is a great little film. It's not perfect. It kind of runs out of steam in the third act, and pads around a bit to get to feature length, but it is that rare thing in Hollywood: well written and thoughtful. And like anything worth watching, I know it's good because I can't get it out of my head. And the more I think about it, the more I like it.
What I'm currently thinking about it is that it might be the most important sci-fi work since The Invisble Man, in terms of what it says about the genre and where it is. Well, at least in terms of film sci-fi, I admit I don't read a lot of sf. I don't read a lot of anything. This is Stevie on TV, after all. Anyway, here's why:
SF, like most genres, owes much to its ancestors and originators, and it's always struck me that they are particularly Victorian works, built on ideas of the 19th century. I think it's almost impossible to make a modernised Dr Jekyll, for example, because we simply don't have the same clear sense of moral and immoral any more, not as deeply held social taboos. Our Mr Hyde would probably just pollute, eat whales and vote Republican, and Dennis Leary already did that gag. But the real point is, the works of science is the enemy. Frankenstein's Monster is a Monster, Hyde is monstrous, so is Dr Griffin, the invisible man. Indeed, science itself is often what makes them monstrous - it is Jekyll's mad pusuit for his chemical that makes him experiment on himself, Dr Griffin's invisibility forces him to control others to get what he needs (which is more research). Science is tincture of mercury, to mix with it is to go mad.
What's more, science was also the gateway to the Other, to the spiritual. Conan Doyle believed fairies could be caught by the science of photography. Jekyll reveals the inner demons of the soul, Frankenstein creates life and learns what it is to be God (or at least, Prometheus, a demigod), the inventor of the Time Machine is thrown into an eden-like world with a kind of angels and demons. In the derivative works of the pulps, of course, science is simply the rabbit-hole to the fantastic, and just as with fantasy, this is often a playground for some kind of morality, and always the field of the supernatural.
The thing is, fast forward fifty years to Asimov and Clarke and things still haven't changed very much. Asimov likes robots but he writes a lot about societies that fear or hate them. And even where there is less of the devil, God is still very much in the machine: Clarke makes his aliens godlike in their science and their names (the Ramans, for example). Dick fears cyborgs even while he wants to have sex with them, seeing them as a kind of living lie, like memory alteration. It is uncharitable but not entirelty inaccurate to view SF as a history of boogeymen in different masks: we traded a fear of robots and cyborgs for a fear of snow crashes, grey goo and of course, the Singularity (which is kind of a robotic grey goo, two fears for the price of one).
Which is not to say SF is a bleak genre, although, since it is typically a kind of satire, it is rarely very upbeat. Star Trek is of course the flagship of science bringing moral rectitude to the world, or at least, the two going hand in hand - but even it ran into gods and demons in space, and, for all their talk of going boldly, more than once destroyed or ran from the things their science uncovered, or devices they felt man was not ready for.
Of course, Moon does end up with science revealing man's evil - the existence of cloning is what allows Sam to be abused. But what I like about it is that it totally rejects the traditional storyline of such stories, which is basically one of fear. The clone is typically a doppelganger, a goatee'd thing of evil, and must ask questions about good and evil, or the existence of a soul. But Moon destroys these ideas and embraces a completely different kind of spirituality by basically ignoring any spiritual questions. Sam is Sam is Sam. They all remember the same things so they are all the same guys, within and without. They do come to blows but one must not be destroyed for the other to live, this is not another tale of man's duality or schizophrenia. Sam is friends with himself; looks after himself; saves himself. This is man's humanity to man writ large as man's humanity to himself.
And that's unexpected - but not unnatural. We've been conditioned, I think, to fear what science will do to society and to us, and sometimes there just isn't evidence for it. There was a famous article about a robotic device designed to detect landmines by walking across the field. The clever AI meant that whatever combination of legs the device lost, it would find a way to keep moving forward. When a test was shown to the general, he demanded its end when the thing was crawling forward on one last leg. When asked why, he said it was "inhumane". So many stories revolve around us fearing robots but the truth is I don't think we will. Oppress, maybe, but like we oppress dogs, we won't do it with fear. Again, Moon follows this pattern: the robot is not Pinocchio or the Tin Man, it doesn't want to be human. It's not Frankenstein, turning on its creator. It's not a false image pretending to be human, nor do we wonder if it has a soul, because there is no need. GERTY proves itself human enough through its actions - it's a friend, and that's what matters. Moon again deliberately dodges the question (while also messing with your expectations).
(This, by the way, was another problem with Avatar - it seemed to be written for an audience who had never seen Cameron's very own Aliens, who weren't aware of its genre-defining conventions and rules. Not that it had to follow them but it should have acknowledged them. Moon on the other hand knows you think the robot is going to turn evil, because it thinks you've seen one or two other films in your life, and it plays with that.)
Probably the most interesting spiritual reversal of Moon is of course, in the heavens themselves. In a deliberate image reference to the moon above us on earth, earth hangs gilded and mysterious above Sam's world. And it is his heaven, his reprieve and his loved ones. So very, very many films have positioned the spiritual in space, either metaphorically or even literally - Solaris and Contact have our dead relatives out there, Event Horizon finds the literal Hell, Kirk found iconoclasm he could punch. But Sam finds nothing but himself on the Moon, and his spirituality remains on Earth. Idealised, yes, but on the other hand not turned into a magical place ONLY because it is the cradle of humanity (I always thought Aliens 4 was wrong-headed for trying to make me care about aliens being loose on earth, because there was no reason in any of the films to suggest earth really mattered to anyone any more). No, Sam's heaven is not manufactured nor is it even very spiritual, it is flesh and blood and people. In Solaris and Contact we went into space and found aliens were our dead relatives and maybe god or heaven. In Moon, we go back to earth and find heaven is our flesh and blood sons and daughters, right where we left them.
There are of course movies which have suggested that space (and/or science) changes nothing about basic humanity but even they tend to end up singing the song that mankind takes his inherent inhumanity into space with him, poisoning even the heavens with his sin. Moon tells us that man takes his basic HUMANITY with him into space, and it is not phased by robots or clones or the far distances between. He finds no gods or demons, just himself, and he's a being of love, and all he needs.
So here then is science fiction for the new millennium, freed at last of our Victorian fears and mysticism. No longer afraid of what science may do to us or not do to us, or what we may do with science, and no longer hiding from demons carried by us into heaven or the gods found lurking therein. It's an inspiring film that is truly humanist and truly human - and proud of it.
Moon is a great little film. It's not perfect. It kind of runs out of steam in the third act, and pads around a bit to get to feature length, but it is that rare thing in Hollywood: well written and thoughtful. And like anything worth watching, I know it's good because I can't get it out of my head. And the more I think about it, the more I like it.
What I'm currently thinking about it is that it might be the most important sci-fi work since The Invisble Man, in terms of what it says about the genre and where it is. Well, at least in terms of film sci-fi, I admit I don't read a lot of sf. I don't read a lot of anything. This is Stevie on TV, after all. Anyway, here's why:
SF, like most genres, owes much to its ancestors and originators, and it's always struck me that they are particularly Victorian works, built on ideas of the 19th century. I think it's almost impossible to make a modernised Dr Jekyll, for example, because we simply don't have the same clear sense of moral and immoral any more, not as deeply held social taboos. Our Mr Hyde would probably just pollute, eat whales and vote Republican, and Dennis Leary already did that gag. But the real point is, the works of science is the enemy. Frankenstein's Monster is a Monster, Hyde is monstrous, so is Dr Griffin, the invisible man. Indeed, science itself is often what makes them monstrous - it is Jekyll's mad pusuit for his chemical that makes him experiment on himself, Dr Griffin's invisibility forces him to control others to get what he needs (which is more research). Science is tincture of mercury, to mix with it is to go mad.
What's more, science was also the gateway to the Other, to the spiritual. Conan Doyle believed fairies could be caught by the science of photography. Jekyll reveals the inner demons of the soul, Frankenstein creates life and learns what it is to be God (or at least, Prometheus, a demigod), the inventor of the Time Machine is thrown into an eden-like world with a kind of angels and demons. In the derivative works of the pulps, of course, science is simply the rabbit-hole to the fantastic, and just as with fantasy, this is often a playground for some kind of morality, and always the field of the supernatural.
The thing is, fast forward fifty years to Asimov and Clarke and things still haven't changed very much. Asimov likes robots but he writes a lot about societies that fear or hate them. And even where there is less of the devil, God is still very much in the machine: Clarke makes his aliens godlike in their science and their names (the Ramans, for example). Dick fears cyborgs even while he wants to have sex with them, seeing them as a kind of living lie, like memory alteration. It is uncharitable but not entirelty inaccurate to view SF as a history of boogeymen in different masks: we traded a fear of robots and cyborgs for a fear of snow crashes, grey goo and of course, the Singularity (which is kind of a robotic grey goo, two fears for the price of one).
Which is not to say SF is a bleak genre, although, since it is typically a kind of satire, it is rarely very upbeat. Star Trek is of course the flagship of science bringing moral rectitude to the world, or at least, the two going hand in hand - but even it ran into gods and demons in space, and, for all their talk of going boldly, more than once destroyed or ran from the things their science uncovered, or devices they felt man was not ready for.
Of course, Moon does end up with science revealing man's evil - the existence of cloning is what allows Sam to be abused. But what I like about it is that it totally rejects the traditional storyline of such stories, which is basically one of fear. The clone is typically a doppelganger, a goatee'd thing of evil, and must ask questions about good and evil, or the existence of a soul. But Moon destroys these ideas and embraces a completely different kind of spirituality by basically ignoring any spiritual questions. Sam is Sam is Sam. They all remember the same things so they are all the same guys, within and without. They do come to blows but one must not be destroyed for the other to live, this is not another tale of man's duality or schizophrenia. Sam is friends with himself; looks after himself; saves himself. This is man's humanity to man writ large as man's humanity to himself.
And that's unexpected - but not unnatural. We've been conditioned, I think, to fear what science will do to society and to us, and sometimes there just isn't evidence for it. There was a famous article about a robotic device designed to detect landmines by walking across the field. The clever AI meant that whatever combination of legs the device lost, it would find a way to keep moving forward. When a test was shown to the general, he demanded its end when the thing was crawling forward on one last leg. When asked why, he said it was "inhumane". So many stories revolve around us fearing robots but the truth is I don't think we will. Oppress, maybe, but like we oppress dogs, we won't do it with fear. Again, Moon follows this pattern: the robot is not Pinocchio or the Tin Man, it doesn't want to be human. It's not Frankenstein, turning on its creator. It's not a false image pretending to be human, nor do we wonder if it has a soul, because there is no need. GERTY proves itself human enough through its actions - it's a friend, and that's what matters. Moon again deliberately dodges the question (while also messing with your expectations).
(This, by the way, was another problem with Avatar - it seemed to be written for an audience who had never seen Cameron's very own Aliens, who weren't aware of its genre-defining conventions and rules. Not that it had to follow them but it should have acknowledged them. Moon on the other hand knows you think the robot is going to turn evil, because it thinks you've seen one or two other films in your life, and it plays with that.)
Probably the most interesting spiritual reversal of Moon is of course, in the heavens themselves. In a deliberate image reference to the moon above us on earth, earth hangs gilded and mysterious above Sam's world. And it is his heaven, his reprieve and his loved ones. So very, very many films have positioned the spiritual in space, either metaphorically or even literally - Solaris and Contact have our dead relatives out there, Event Horizon finds the literal Hell, Kirk found iconoclasm he could punch. But Sam finds nothing but himself on the Moon, and his spirituality remains on Earth. Idealised, yes, but on the other hand not turned into a magical place ONLY because it is the cradle of humanity (I always thought Aliens 4 was wrong-headed for trying to make me care about aliens being loose on earth, because there was no reason in any of the films to suggest earth really mattered to anyone any more). No, Sam's heaven is not manufactured nor is it even very spiritual, it is flesh and blood and people. In Solaris and Contact we went into space and found aliens were our dead relatives and maybe god or heaven. In Moon, we go back to earth and find heaven is our flesh and blood sons and daughters, right where we left them.
There are of course movies which have suggested that space (and/or science) changes nothing about basic humanity but even they tend to end up singing the song that mankind takes his inherent inhumanity into space with him, poisoning even the heavens with his sin. Moon tells us that man takes his basic HUMANITY with him into space, and it is not phased by robots or clones or the far distances between. He finds no gods or demons, just himself, and he's a being of love, and all he needs.
So here then is science fiction for the new millennium, freed at last of our Victorian fears and mysticism. No longer afraid of what science may do to us or not do to us, or what we may do with science, and no longer hiding from demons carried by us into heaven or the gods found lurking therein. It's an inspiring film that is truly humanist and truly human - and proud of it.
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