Heroes Schmeroes
What is it with American TV drama and sentimental dialogue? I have just watched the first two episodes of NBC’s Heroes. Just about every conversation in this latest mega series followed a simple pattern:
- Someone will fly off in a rage, not listening to the other character.
- They realise they've overstepped a mark, so they pause. The camerawork and tempo indicate they are reflecting, genuinely (emotion being the index of truthfulness – an epistemological black hole).
- They sigh, possibly look at their shoes, then say, "Look, I'm sorry, its just...". And then they reveal some inner emotional turmoil as an excuse and as an appeal for understanding.
- Finally they make a joke, smile, shrug, and everything's ok, but it happens again in the next scene, and the one after that
This is a mode of conversation based on interiority. The TV character reveals their interior, their emotions, and appeal to others’ interior states (‘heart to heart’). The episode degenerates into a series of touching moments. Plot lines cannot move on until a person’s interior state has been fully revealed and acknowledged by others. Things slow down and get stuck because someone won’t accept, or isn’t aware of, how their daughter or brother or boyfriend feels. This might be acceptable in something like Grey’s Anatomy, but in a series about superheroes?
Is there a generation growing up talking this way? Perhaps it is flippant to suggest scriptwriters are particularly prone to certain kinds of therapy? What if this mode of conversation seeps into other genres, even into news and current affairs? Have newscasters begun to reveal their emotional response to events as if audiences expect this now?
* Exceptions in the first episodes were some of those scenes involving the Japanese character Hiro.
Ben O'Loughlin
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Reader Comments (2)
I watched the first couple of episodes of Heroes and I know exactly what you mean. Although before I saw it, I had read somewhere that the great success of the series was to merge comic book formats with a soap-opera style presentation (which of course gave it access to a potentially greater audience, and encourages people to come back and watch more of it).
Incidentally, but slightly related, I blogged on the opening episode of Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip on MoreFour the other night. Like anything involving Aaron Sorkin, the dialogue absolutely sizzles off the screen. Amusingly though one critic argued the reason it wasn't the success it maybe should have been and was cancelled after one series was that it failed to reflect the reality of working in television... apparently the people who produce TV shows are nowhere near as clever or articulate as the show made them out to be!
Just to continue the American TV show thread, has anyone heard about a show called Jericho? It was also cancelled after one series by CBS, however the fan community didn't just roll over. Instead a mass protest was organized through the internet, the centre piece being a shipment of 17 tons of peanuts to CBS headquarters (a reference to a line in the finale). CBS stuck to their guns and refused to reinstate the show, but the campaign received nationwide media coverage and the support of much of the cast, and after much speculation CBS finally caved in. Apparently this is the first time that a fan movement has managed to reverse a decision to cancel a show by a major broadcaster.
One of the reasons CBS cancelled Jericho was because of unsatisfactory ratings. However many in the fan community were using tivo or something similar to record the programme and then watch it later. The Nielsen rating system doesn't take this into account (it also ignores people who watch on the CBS website), so unless a new way of coming up with ratings is devised, Jericho is not likely to survive long.